Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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THE ANTINOMY OF DEATH

ernst bloch and theodor w. adorno on utopia and hope

Hent de Vries

To cite this article: Hent de Vries (2022) THE ANTINOMY OF DEATH, Angelaki, 27:1, 110-127,
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2022.2019478

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 27 number 1 february 2022

I n a published 1964 radio conversation with

Ernst Bloch, entitled “Etwas fehlt … Über
die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht
[Something’s Missing … On the Contradictions
of Utopian Longing],” Theodor W. Adorno
agreed with the former thinker’s paradoxical
assessment that irrespective of the near-over-
whelming – ontic, perhaps, even ontological –
prevalence of death as the last word and ulti-
mate concept of much of Western thought, hent de vries
widely reflected in traditional as well as
modern societies, we must assume nothing
short of a “miracle [Wunder]” to afford THE ANTINOMY OF
genuine utopian longing, with regards to both
thinking and agency, its real possibility. And DEATH
while such a miracle, contravening the seem- ernst bloch and theodor
ingly uncontested reign of finitude, including
the apparent irreversibility of the fateful dead w. adorno on utopia and
of slain victims and the triumphalist legacy of
their conquering, wealth and power accumulat-
hope
ing victors, would not entirely depend on us, no
critical thought, much less any truly liberating
praxis – no authentic beginning, individual
rebirth or social revolution – would ever come notch or more. Only in realizing an occasion’s
off the ground without our (now desperately, apparent “nothingness” as our very own, as
then confidently) wanting it so. We must, the virtual possibility entrusted to us, would
Bloch ventured and Adorno appeared to we let our will or desire make it eventually –
concede here, existentially and politically, and eventfully – so.
jump on the very occasions that we, for meta- The antinomy of death, as Bloch and Adorno
physical reasons, do not occasion directly. For insisted in their surprising dialogue, is that
as strategic opportunities for subjects and citi- dying or, as Martin Heidegger put it, being-
zens, these same occasions should be con- toward-death (Sein zum Tode), seems, on the
sidered nodes and modes of possible thinking one hand, to form the be-all and end-all con-
and acting and, hence, of an existence or, dition, definition, and destination of human
rather, “inexistence” that lies merely barren existence (its alpha and omega, if not, therefore,
unless and until we ourselves, intimately and its true “life,” more broadly), while, on the
collectively, step in its – historical and empiri- other hand, it therein or thereby also expresses
cal – void and, as we do so, step up things a and determines a conceptual and historical,

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/22/010110-18 © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2022.2019478

110

societal and political “totality” (in the Hegelian-
Marxian idiom) that must (can and ought) be
considered as false, as “negative.” This said,
as the undeniable and unavoidable “whole” of
human experience, death and dying – includ-
ing, needless to say, “social death” – cannot
be philosophy’s, theory’s and praxis’s, last
word; after all, they are also the “untrue”
totality.
Yet as to what would lie beyond and dissolve
this same antinomy, Bloch and Adorno, at least
thus far, hardly agreed. For the latter, a “liber-
ated humanity” would no longer equal “total-
ity” (“Eine befreite Menschheit wäre nicht
länger Totalität,” we read somewhere);
instead, if anything, it would resemble a non-
specified “coherence of the non-identical”
(“Kohärenz des Nichtidentischen”). For the
former, by contrast, a true or realized utopia
would in one way or other be expressive of an
“all-feeling All” (“allerfühlenden Alles”), in
close similarity, perhaps, to the “god spirit”
(“Gottgeist”) as such. Bloch, throughout his
oeuvre remained “a Marxist Schellingian,”
Adorno, for his part, a post-Hegelian Kantian,
a “Platonist of the non-identical,” as some
have claimed.1
However, Adorno’s appreciation of the
concept and manifestation of totality is
nuanced, indeed, negative and dialectical. It
is worth pausing and recalling what he, unchar-
acteristically in this conversation with Bloch,
sees as the idea’s central feature and fracture,
that is, its difficulty and metaphysical over-
reach as well as its indelible promise. In one
word, its “truth content” and ditto
“moment,” as the lingo goes, lies in its residual
insight, namely, that all – all that is, was, and,
we assume, still will be – might yet be (made)
different:
Whatever utopia is, whatever can be rep-
resented as utopia, this is the transformation
of the totality […] [W]hat people have lost
subjectively in regard to consciousness is
very simply the capacity to imagine the total-
ity as something that could be completely
different. That people are sworn to this
world as it is and have this blocked con-
sciousness vis-à-vis possibility, all this has a
111
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deep cause, indeed, a cause that […] is
very much connected exactly to the prox-
imity of utopia […] [A]ll humans deep
down, whether they admit this or not,
know that it would be possible or it could
be different. Not only could they live
without hunger and probably without
anxiety, but they could also live as free
human beings. At the same time, the social
apparatus has hardened itself against
people, and thus, whatever appears before
their eyes all over the world as attainable
possibility, as the evident possibility of ful-
fillment, presents itself to them as radically
impossible. And when people universally
say today what was once reserved only for
philistines in more harmless times, “Oh,
that’s just utopian” […] this is due to the
situation compelling people to master the
contradiction between the evident possi-
bility of fulfillment and the just as evident
impossibility of fulfillment only in this
way, compelling them to identify themselves
with the impossibility and to make this
impossibility into their own affair. In other
words, to use Freud, they “identify them-
selves with the aggressor” and say that this
should not be, whereby they feel that it is
precisely this that should be, but they are
prevented from attaining it by a wicked
spell cast over the world. (Adorno and
Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 1–17, 3–4/350–68, 353; all trans.
mod.)
But might “the-all-that-could-be-different”
pertain to more than the history – and,
perhaps, more than the natural history (Natur-
geschichte) – that, we think, we know suffi-
ciently well and whose resources, we moreover
often feel, we may well have exhausted as far
as their spiritual and intellectual, moral and
political energies or other repositories are con-
cerned? Put differently, would the other possi-
bility that, Adorno surmises, is “just as
evident” as its opposite, even though a malig-
nant spell continues to block its access from
view almost completely at present, extend
beyond this life as well? Would its very
thought and the praxis it seeks open onto a
“beyond-of-death-and-dying,” leaving not just
the determinants of our natality but also and
 the antinomy of death
especially our very mortality and finitude, our
being-towards-death, resolutely behind?
Such a poignant question may seem to defy
its very purpose when addressed, as is the
case here, to the materialist, more precisely,
utopian-sensualist as well as negative dialecti-
cal thinker that Adorno, at least throughout
his mature works and lecture courses, had con-
sistently claimed he would be. Yet the question
is pertinent and its suspected, affirmative
answer – something to the extent of “death
cannot have the last word,” “a redeemed or
genuine totality would regard, restore, and
include ‘all’ (i.e., not merely present but past
as well as future) generations in a novel, this
time, more true totality” – should be seen as a
logical no less than metaphysical as well as
ethical consequence of his critical, utopian, at
times, even messianico-mystical thought.
After all, Adorno notes further with respect to
the transformed concept of “totality” that it
does not at all “limit” thought or even agency
to “the system of human relations,” the
material and social substrate, in Marxian
terms, but, on the contrary, also ventures
beyond, that is, to where no one has gone (or,
perhaps, even so much as could possibly go as
a matter of course). And the consequences of
such a speculative no less than materialist
thought for utopian thinking and praxis
would seem as inescapable:
there is nothing like a single, fixable utopian
content […] all categories can change them-
selves according to their own constituency
[…] [W]hat is essential about the concept
of utopia is that it does not consist of a
certain, single selected category that
changes itself and from which everything
constitutes itself, for example, in that one
assumes that the category of happiness
alone is the key to utopia […] Not even the
category of freedom can be isolated. If it
all depended on viewing the category of
freedom alone as the key to utopia, then
the content of idealism would really mean
the same as utopia, for idealism seeks
nothing else but the realization of freedom
without actually including the realization of
happiness in the process. It is thus within a
context that all these categories appear and
are connected. The category of happiness
has always something wretched [Armseliges]
about it as an isolated category and appears
deceptive to the other categories. It would
change itself just like, on the other hand,
the category of freedom, too, which would
then no longer be the end in itself [Selbst-
zweck] or even telos of interiority [Innerlich-
keit], but would have to fulfill itself. (Adorno
and Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 7/357)
Last but not least, as the “neuralgic point” of
all “proper [eigentlich]” critical thinking,
Adorno bravely concludes here (conceding to
a “jargon of authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]” for
which he had elsewhere taken Martin Heidegger
and his so-called dialectical or “crisis”-oriented
theological contemporaries to task), such fulfill-
ment would require nothing less than “the abo-
lition [Abschaffung] of death” (Adorno and
Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt”
8/357).
For Adorno, in his magnum opus, the 1966
Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics), this
counter-intuitive and, strictly speaking,
counter-factual thought crystallizes around
the paradoxical insight that the very idea and
practical realization of immortality – the
“unthinkability [Unausdenkbarkeit]” of death
and of the despair it instills, not accepting the
“fear” of “worse than death” that Auschwitz
bequeathed – is, once again, in philosophical
terms, de rigueur; and this, again, not only
speculatively, that is, consistently negatively
and, this sense, dialectically, but also materi-
alistically speaking. Obsolete, indeed, perverse
as the assumption of the personal survival of
biological death in one or other ethereal and
individuated form or way may still seem to
us, nothing less than the “resurrection [Aufer-
stehung]” of the flesh, that is, of the dead
body, must, from here on, be considered an
integral part of any conception of utopia that
deserves its name. No restoration of all things
in their integrality, the restitutio in integrum,
to cite Walter Benjamin’s “Theologisch-poli-
tisches Fragment” (“Theological-Political Frag-
ment”) and, resonating through it, a whole, if
long forgotten and repressed, tradition of
112

theologizing, could ever hope to do without it
once and for all (Adorno, Lectures on Negative
Dialectics 80).2
Restitution and redress – and, with them,
immortality – are motifs that Adorno in all like-
lihood inherited from his friend and mentor
Benjamin, who famously appropriated them
as follows, borrowing from a vast theological
archive that he consulted extensively:
The spiritual restititutio in integrum, which
introduces immortality, corresponds to a
worldly restitution that leads to an eternity
of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally
transient worldly existence, transient in its
totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal
totality, the rhythm of messianic nature, is
happiness. For nature is messianic by reason
of its eternal and total passing away. (“Theo-
logical-Political Fragment”/“Theologisch-
politisches Fragment” 305–06/203–04)
At a minimum, it is through the influence of
Benjamin’s receptive repeated reading of
Adolf von Harnack’s massive trilogy, the Lehr-
buch der Dogmengeschichte (History of
Dogma), and, perhaps indirectly, through
Origen of Alexandria’s influential treatise On
First Principles that Adorno may have familiar-
ized himself with these most abstruse of
theological thoughts concerning the reconstitu-
tion or apokatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις) of all (or
all things, πάντων). The doctrine goes back to
the single biblical reference in Acts 3.21 and
was officially considered anathema in the
Western Church since the Council of Constan-
tinople in 543. Yet Origen’s Christian Neopla-
tonist thought has older philosophical and
other theological as well as scriptural sources
as well, beginning with Heraclitus’s fragment,
according to which “the beginning and end
are common,” and I Corinthians 15.25–28,
which speaks of the time when God, having
put “all things” under Christ, who is subject
to Him, shall be “all in all [πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν,
panta en pasin]” (qtd in Edwards).3
Yet another of Benjamin’s sources was the
first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie
(Spirit of Utopia) and the latter’s later
Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution
113
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(Thomas Münzer as a Theologian of the Revolu-
tion).4 Adorno would more fully develop the
heterogenous elements of this historically
deeply controversial motif in his own con-
ception and sketches of an “inverse” or “other
theology,” with the help of a consequent, nega-
tive dialectical logic and in excessive “microlog-
ical” detail, combined with a massive effort of
giving them their eventual maximal impact
across a wealth of material studies in virtually
all of which his peculiar, at once singular and
global, theoretical matrix was put to work.5
According to the latter, a long and largely cata-
strophic history of Western thought qua instru-
mental reason and one-dimensional
anthropology cut us off from our inner and
outer nature, here understood in terms of
“natural history” and the “transience” (Ver-
gängnis) or even “fall” (Zerfall) inscribed in
and all over it.
From its earliest origins to its unfolding in
advanced industrialized societies, Adorno’s
and Max Horkheimer’s bleak diagnosis in Dia-
lektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment) lamented – while basing itself on a
hypothesis and axiom in which a petitio princi-
pii and, hence, logical fallacy, and rhetorical
exaggeration of almost Gnostic and Manichean
proportions was deliberately inserted – that
humanity had been ensnared and, indeed,
increasingly subjected itself, in a so-called
“nexus of immanence” (Immanenzzusammen-
hang), placing itself under the “ban” (Bann)
of a “totally administered world” (verwaltete
Welt) from which, in principle and much less
in practice, no immediate or eventual escape
could be conceived or imagined, postulated or
even hoped for.
Not even the determinate, rather than
merely abstract, negation of genuine dialectical
reason could so much as help us think, let alone
realize, a putative “outside.” As a genuine or
standing possibility, the latter, for Adorno,
was nowhere to be found, more precisely,
located (hence, its u-topian nature). As such,
qua possibility, that is, potentiality or latency,
it would precisely fail us as an actual or
present condition and ability, but would, on
the contrary, first need to be established,
 the antinomy of death
acquired, and sustained or nourished as such.
As a consequence, such possibility – as the
possibility of possibility – could only be non-
discursively fathomed and expressed as a
“thought figure” (Denkfigur), of sorts, and, at
best, lived as an “unintelligible bond or com-
mitment” (uneinsichtige Verbindlichkeit).
This is what the Platonism or Neoplatonism
of the non-identical comes down to as it renders
and surrenders itself only in the most paradox-
ical, and aporetic – indeed, virtual, that is,
counter-intuitive and counter-factual, quasi-
mystical as much as radically skeptical (or, as
Adorno also says, ascetic) – of ways. After all,
said non-identity only ambiguously betrays
and, in this sense, translates what it says or,
more precisely, gestures towards. This,
nothing else, is the predicament at least as
much as it is the promise of all predication (dis-
cursive and other). And the latter remains its
“irreducible element,” to cite Claude Lefort,
who would return to Adorno’s musings on the
presumed “end of immortality,” in his own pol-
itical writings.6 Moreover, it is the heart of what
Adorno will come to call “spiritual” rather than
“intellectual” experience.7
Why and how, then, does Adorno reintro-
duce such a counter-factual, metaphysical intui-
tion into modern philosophical thinking and
the deep pragmatics as well as down-to-earth
praxis it may yet inspire? Moreover, where
does his indebtedness to not only Benjamin
but also Bloch in this matter begin but also
end? And, so we must eventually also ask,
what contemporary analogues can we find or
come up with that would have a speculative
and pragmatic use for these recalcitrant
motifs and moments in thought, whose modal-
ities and moods do not cease to surprise even
adamant Adorno readers today?
We will not be able to exhaustively answer all
of these questions within the confines of these
pages. Nonetheless, enough light can be shed
to make the following most suggestive among
Adorno’s remarks, perhaps, somewhat clearer:
Utopian consciousness means a conscious-
ness for which therefore the possibility
that people no longer have to die does not
have anything horrible about it, but is, on
the contrary, that which one actually wants
[…] [I]t is very striking that Heidegger to
a certain degree had already cast aspersion
on the question about the possibility of an
existence without death as a mere ontic ques-
tion that only concerns the end of existence
(Daseinsende), and that he is of the
opinion that death, as it were, would retain
its absolute, ontological, thus essential
dignity also then when, in the realm of the
existing [im Bereich des Seienden], ontically
speaking, death were to disappear – that is,
that therefore this sanctification [Heiligung]
or making death an absolute [Verabsolutier-
ung des Todes] in contemporary philosophy,
[…] the absolute anti-utopia, is also the key
category […] [T]here is no single category
by which utopia allows itself to be named.
But if one wants to see how this entire
matter resolves itself, then this question is
actually the most important […] [W]ithout
the notion of an unfettered life, freed from
death, the idea of utopia, the idea of the
utopia, cannot even be thought at all.
(Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 8/358; trans. mod.)
The motif of immortality makes an appear-
ance in Adorno’s discussion of Kant’s critique
of practical reason and its postulates – i.e.,
God, freedom, and immortality – a critique
that demolishes the metaphysical, natural
theology of old, while keeping the guiding
role of its concepts in place. Further, in
Adorno’s wider oeuvre, the motif is interlaced
with numerous – Christian and Jewish – theolo-
goumena, the most prominent among them
being not only the prohibition of graven
images, the Bilderverbot, that punctuates
Adorno’s reservations, indeed, downright ascet-
ism, vis-à-vis historical or revealed religion, but
also the belief in miracles, the resurrection of
the flesh (which, interestingly, is endorsed by
him in toto), and more scant references to
eschatology and apocalyptic themes (to which
traditional religion seems to devote much less
attention, he notes wryly, than it ought to).
There are two reasons why the concept and
practice of utopian thought and agency do not
merely pertain to a perfection in “this life,”
114

that is, in our present, but regards past gener-
ations (notably those who experienced insuffer-
able deaths and were unjustly slain) as well as
extends to a future, again well beyond our indi-
vidual and political, biological and spiritual
lives.
The first reason can be found in the afore-
mentioned metaphysical – idealist and materi-
alist – concept of totality, which though
mostly and principally “false” or “negative”
throughout human history and its systems of
thought as of governance still retains a
“truth moment” or “truth content” that
could be restated as follows: a fundamental
reason that the power of death needs to be
addressed and overcome is the insight, first
voiced by Benjamin, that not even the dead
would be safe from posterior victors. They
cannot be regarded as dead in the sense of
over and done with, as having no more voice
or say, interest and role to play. Moreover,
as we found earlier, past generations, just
like present and also future ones, form an inte-
gral part of the horizon that notably utopian
thinking and acting needs to include in its
redemptive project, ending history – or,
perhaps, more precisely, prehistory – as we
know it, thus making room for a genuine
“true” and genuinely “positive” history or
natural history to be affirmed in “freedom at
last.”
Yet the dead hold a – deadly – grip on us that
is not merely for the best. The dead not only
need to be protected and heard, as the specters
of those slain, reminding us of the very
“dilemma” that no justice is done until all
past injustices have been undone, one by one
or by one stroke (a general strike or revolution,
resembling an act of “divine violence,” bring-
ing history to a “standstill,” as Benjamin
mused). As Karl Marx well knew and claims
as much in his first, 1867 preface to Das
Kapital (Capital) the dead have left us
another – unredeemed – legacy:
Alongside the modern evils [Notständen],
we are oppressed by a whole series of inher-
ited evils, arising from the passive survival
[Fortvegetation] of archaic and outmoded
115
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modes of production, with their accompany-
ing train of anachronistic [zeitwidrigen]
social and political relations. We suffer not
only from the living, but from the dead. Le
mort saisit le vif! [The dead seizes the
living!]. (91/15)
In spite of this grip and captivity, Marx writes
in the same context, there are many “signs of
the times [Zeichen der Zeit], not to be hidden
by purple mantles of black cassocks” (i.e., by
representatives of either state or ecclesial auth-
ority) that gesture toward an end of all things,
of the powers that be (here of the capitalist
mode of production, whose generalization of
commodification, Capital argues, is the histori-
cally delimited and political economic con-
dition just as much of near-universal
enslavement and “expropriation of the
worker” (940/802), that is, of the proletariat,
as well as of the former’s possible eventual over-
coming). Yet such “signs,” while strangely
promising, Marx cautions, do not carry their
evidence on their sleeves, nor do they guarantee
solace overnight. This, with all the expected
resistance to liberating theory and praxis in
mind, should inform both the tenacity,
patience, and determination of the historical
movement of which Marx knows himself to be
part:
In the domain of political economy, free
scientific inquiry does not merely meet the
same enemies as in all other domains. The
peculiar nature of the material it deals with
summons into the fray on the opposing
side the most violent, sordid and malignant
passions of the human breast, the Furies of
private interest. The Established Church,
for instance, will more readily pardon an
attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine
articles than on one thirty-ninth of its
income. Nowadays atheism itself is a culpa
levis [venial sin], as compared with the criti-
cism of existing property relations. Never-
theless, even there is an unmistakable
advance […] These are signs of the times,
not to be hidden by purple mantles or
black cassocks. They do not signify that
tomorrow a miracle [Wunder] will occur.
They do show that, within the ruling
 the antinomy of death
classes themselves, the foreboding is emer-
ging that the present society is no solid
crystal, but an organism capable of change,
and constantly engaged in a process of
change. (92–93/16)
As Adorno will quip: the apparent historical
necessity – with its virtual repetition of the
same from prehistory to the mega-bomb – is
metaphysically contingent. And yet, while
our liberation from its grip (i.e., the messianic,
redemption, utopia) is not necessary either –
and, hence, far from providentially predes-
tined, theologically speaking, or determined
teleologically, formally or materially, otherwise
– the seeds of its eventual growth and emer-
gence are nonetheless planted somehow, if not
somewhere, in someone or, for that matter, in
some epoch specifically. Its modalities,
timing, and location as well as embodiment
(i.e., incarnation) may well be hidden. Indeed,
utopian thinking assumes nothing else. Yet
that society and its natural history should not
be seen as a petrified rock or “solid crystal,”
impervious to change, this much is certain.
The second reason why the concept and prac-
tice of utopian thought and agency do not
merely connote a perfection in or of this life,
is the formal equivalence of death and God,
both of them “being nothing” that presently
is and, hence, each a grand, unfathomable
“Nothing,” of sorts. Like God, the very idea
of death resembles an abstract negation of all
that we know and live, a negation whose work-
ings can only become determinate and, thereby,
actual if and when this near-empty reference is
anticipated and betrayed in concrete thoughts,
actions, and gestures of hope.
While it is for strictly conceptual – dialecti-
cal or speculative – reasons that utopia cannot
be limited to, say, “this life” lived in freedom
in happiness, as we, here and now, might con-
ceive it (although this is “how far” we are gen-
erally, all too prudently, willing to go), the
theological or onto-theological argumentation
for an authentic, that is, utopian redemption
or restitution is not absent from Bloch’s and
Adorno’s considerations either. As to the
former, Bloch borrows and extrapolates from
a word from Brecht:
People must first fill their stomachs [Es
müssen die Menschen erst satt werden],
and then there can be dance. That is a condi-
tio sine qua non for being able to talk earn-
estly about the other [das andere] without it
being used for deception. Only when all the
guests have sat down at the table can the
Messiah, can Christ come. Thus, Marxism
in its entirety, even when brought in in its
most illuminating form and anticipated in
its entire realization, is only a condition
[Bedingung] for a life in freedom, life in
happiness, life in possible fulfillment, life
with contents. (Adorno and Bloch, “Some-
thing’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 15/366)
The latter, the remarkable dialogue between
Bloch and Adorno reveals, are themselves, in
turn, conditions, more precisely, necessary
albeit insufficient conditions, for a life in
which death would be either vanquished or
has lost its terrible weight; a burden which,
almost by definition, presses upon us such
that a life without death seems inconceivable,
indeed, the impossible par excellence. It is for
this reason, and not just because of its horror,
that Emmanuel Levinas, in his last given lec-
tures under the title La mort et le temps
(God, Death, and Time), the only context in
which he brings up Bloch directly and exten-
sively in his oeuvre, speaks of the question of
death as one that is “sans ré ponse,” the
“without response.”8 No epistemic, much less
moral, certainty is held, for us, in reserve
here, even when and where we may just get it
“right.”
Adorno explains why we cannot talk directly
or coherently about death or, we should add, a
life that does not live up to its very concept (a
life that does not live), nor about the impulse,
the injunction and, he says, new categorical
imperative to wholly transcend it. This diffi-
culty underlying our freedom reveals not so
much an epistemic problem as there is no
problem of knowledge that, in the course of
Western thought, has not transformed or
expressed itself in a predicament which is,
first of all, one of “natural history,” of transi-
ence, as Adorno adds, echoing Georg Lukpá cs
and Benjamin. And, in modernity, it has
116

become one of economic form, of capitalism,
monetary exchange, and, thereby, of commodi-
fication as well. This said, beyond the question
of historicity, of the “world spirit’s” presumed
continuity and the “now time’s” apparent dis-
continuity, there is a more “profound meta-
physical reason” why one can “actually talk
utopia only in a negative way” (Adorno and
Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt”
10/360–61).
It should be clear that there is a “deep con-
nection” between the “prohibition of casting a
picture of utopia” – a prohibition which,
Adorno adds, is made “actually for the sake
of utopia” – and the second of the ten
central biblical commandments – “Thou
shalt not make a graven image!” (Adorno
and Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 11/361). Or, more precisely and exten-
sively, following the King James translation:
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, or any likeness of any thing that is
in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the
earth” (Exodus 20.4) – a commandment, it
will be noted, that does not limit its ban to
the image of God, but takes the latter as a
measure for all things existing or not yet exist-
ing, thus inaugurating a conceptual ascetism
that Critical Theory and, a fortiori, negative
dialectics will only radicalize. It is the parallel,
yet deep, connection with the Scriptural com-
mandment which reminds us of the common
intention behind these attempts to avoid ido-
latry, namely, to ward off a “cheap” or
“false” utopia, that is to say, “the utopia
that can be bought” (Adorno and Bloch,
“Something’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 11/
361) or that, so we are tempted to think, can
be produced, prepared and anticipated,
made possible and actually merited or even
hoped for. Quod non.
But what, then, is the basis of this continued
talk of utopia, albeit “only in a negative way”?
For Bloch, it entails a near-leap of faith and
be it of the “atheism in Christianity” that he
elsewhere deep down uncovers. Death may
seem to have the last word, but that, paradoxi-
cally, says nothing at all, while citing positive
117
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theologoumena, obviously, does not resolve
matters either:
Still, it is necessary to have a miracle to
remove death from view. This means, then,
the resurrection of Christ, that is, faith, or
“Who will save me from the jaws of
death?” as stated in the Bible, in the New
Testament. This is transcendental. This is
something we cannot do. So we need the
help of baptism, Christ’s death, and resur-
rection. In the process the utopian is trans-
cended in the choice of its possible means.
And, nevertheless, it belongs to utopia.
(Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 9–10/360)
This much is certain: for Adorno, the via
negativa of discursive or imaginative ascesis
resembles in its very form and structure the
apophatics of mystical theology. It has
nothing to do with philosophical skepticism,
naively understood, nor with some supposed
metaphysical pessimism of, say, a Schopen-
hauerian and Horkheimerian signature (as in
the latter’s Sehnsucht nach dem ganz
Anderen).
Instead, the threefold basis of what Adorno
alternatively calls his negative dialectics, nega-
tive metaphysics, or negative anthropology is
to be found, first, in his anti-Hegelian use of
so-called “determinate” as opposed to “abstract
negation”; second, in his minimal theological
twist of Anselm’s unum argumentum, that is
to say, the ontological proof for God’s existence
(as Kant called it); and, third, in what I would
like to describe as his deeply pragmatic – or,
if you like, deep pragmatist – turn. The latter
aspect – Adorno’s deep pragmatism – might
well prove to be his lasting contribution to phil-
osophical thought. In any case, it is the aspect
that, in the existing scholarship, has not yet
received the attention it deserves.9
Let me quickly review these three conceptual
strategies.
(a) First, in his conversation with Bloch,
Adorno makes an inversely Spinozist claim,
suggesting that instead of Spinoza’s principle
verum index sui et falsi (“the true is the sign
of itself and of the false”), we should rather
state the reverse, namely falsum index sui et
 the antinomy of death
veri (“the false thing is the sign of itself and of
what is true”). This, nothing else, is the formal
definition of the dialectical principle of the
determined negation (bestimmte Negation).
Responding to Bloch’s assertion that “the
essential function of utopia is a critique of
what is present,” followed by his correlative
claim that “[i]f we had not already gone
beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive
them as barriers,” Adorno draws what he takes
to be its logical – negative dialectical –
consequence:
utopia is essentially in the determined nega-
tion, in the determined negation of that
which merely is, and by concretizing itself
as something false, it always points at the
same time to what should be […] Falsum –
whatever is false [das Falsche] – index sui
et veri. That means that the true thing deter-
mines itself via the false thing, or via that
which makes itself falsely known. And
insofar as we are not allowed to cast the
picture of utopia, insofar as we do not
know what the correct thing would be, we
know exactly, to be sure, what the false
thing is. That is actually the only form in
which utopia is given to us at all. (Adorno
and Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 12/362–63)
By extension, we could surmise that only
“death,” including the “death of immortality,”
which would be utopia’s negative counterpoint,
gives us, if not a positive concept or idea,
let alone reality, of utopia then at least a
minimal hint and hope of what it would mean
– in the virtual negative and determinate nega-
tion of death and its contours – to aspire for
more (e.g., for a transience that endures, and
for an eternity that is no longer or not yet).
The negative truth of death raises the idea and
hence possibility – nothing more, nothing less
– of a truth that might just be that of life and sur-
vival and the extension (i.e., the living-on or
even more-than-mere-life, more-than-“bare”-
life) it nourishes or intimates beyond what is
here and now given (whether ontologically or
biologically, empirically or historically, phenom-
enologically or psychologically).
But if the insistence on negativity reveals the
– still, indeed, forever negative – contours of
what might yet reveal itself to be different,
namely that which is “other than the power of
that which merely is” (call it the transcendence,
rather than the victory of “immortal” life over
the immanence of identity and totality, which
are, as we have seen, the Self-Same of so-
called “death”), then the reverse rings true as
well.
The very insistence on some superlative –
i.e., non-identifiable and non-totalizable, but
somehow eminent – other, “greater than
which nothing can be thought,” conjures up
the hints and hopes (call it the practical postu-
lation and pragmatic injunction) of what, in the
past and present world, might yet reveal itself
as already different in nature and kind.
But here also resides the “confounding
aspect” of utopian thinking and longing, for,
as Adorno notes:
something terrible happens due to the fact
that we are prohibited to make an image,
namely: with regard to that which should
exist, the more it can only be said negatively,
the less something determined can be rep-
resented. But then – and this is probably
even more frightening – the prohibition of
a concrete statement of utopia tends toward
defaming utopian consciousness itself and
to engulf what is its proper aim, which is
the will that things are different. (Adorno
and Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 12/363)
If there was anything that betrayed Marx’s
socialism in the wake of his justified critique
of the utopists, it was real existing socialism’s
(i.e., at the time, the Eastern Bloc’s) hypostati-
zation of the “how,” of the “apparatus,” includ-
ing its analogues in philosophical thinking (i.e.,
“Diamat”). This said, in the absence not just of
a blueprint or roadmap but of any inkling as to
where to start and move next, no progress,
much less its fulfillment, comes clearly in view.
(b) This brings me to the second, com-
plementary, point. From the precarious situ-
ation in which human existence finds itself, a
situation that affects us both individually and
118

collectively, Adorno draws an astounding con-
clusion, surprising even Bloch (“That surprises
me!”). For in fully restoring a “beyond death”
or “without death” motif to utopia and the
hope it alone can inspire, he notes, we have,
in fact, come “strangely close to the ontological
proof of God” (Adorno and Bloch, “Some-
thing’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 16/366). The
ontological proof for the existence of God is
taken to spell out and formalize what Bloch
takes from Brecht, namely the dictum “etwas
fehlt … ,” “something’s missing” or, more pre-
cisely, “Was bleibt, ist das hartnäkkige ‘Aber
etwas fehlt!’” (What remains is the stubborn
‘But something’s missing!’), a telling line
from the first Act of Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s
opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahaggony
(Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny)
(Drew 18–24). Reflecting on how its implicit
claim enables us to distill yet another important
truth from Anselm’s demonstration, Adorno
comments that this is “a phrase that we actually
cannot have if there were no ferments, that is,
kernels [Keime] of what this concept [i.e., the
concept of something missing or imperfection,
incompletion] properly means” (Adorno and
Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt”
16/367). “Something’s missing” is a claim, a
proclamation or exclamation, which expresses
a view that invites, perhaps, even forces
thought to think more than it does, to reach
further than thought.
The reason would be this, Adorno continues:
“unless there is some trace of truth to the onto-
logical proof of God, that is, unless the moment
of its reality is also already involved [mitbetei-
ligt] in the force of the concept itself [in der
Gewalt des Begriffs selber], there could not
only be no utopia but there could also not be
any thinking” (Adorno and Bloch, “Some-
thing’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 16/367). As to
the so-called ontological proof for God’s exist-
ence Adorno is very explicit. It makes its
appearance in the final meditations of Negative
Dialectics, in the lectures on Metaphysics, on
Philosophical Terminology, and, as said, in
the conversation with Bloch.
As in the Cartesian idea of perfection, of the
Infinite, whose formal structure Levinas
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describes as the very gesture and movement
of metaphysical desire, of the thinking that
“thinks more than it thinks,” there is in “some-
thing’s missing” an implication – a fleeting
reference or requisite – that is far from acciden-
tal or arbitrary, but structurally, indeed, logi-
cally and essentially, called out and called for.
At times, it would seem that we are dealing
with a Platonic hermeneutic truism here
(think of the epistemological paradox raised
and solved by the Theatetus, namely that in
order to find what we do not know, we need
to somehow partially, implicitly, or indirectly
know what is sought already). It is as if
Adorno were saying: we cannot miss – or fail
– something of which we have only the faintest
idea or inkling, however much its full
expression (its intentional, let alone, historical
or empirical realization) continues to stand
under the prohibition of its image. We must
somehow – somewhere – know or acknowledge
without knowing, either because we think and
know more than we know or because we know
without knowing fully, as if seeing “through
a glass darkly.”
But, in fact, it is the very surplus named by
the concept, “greater than which nothing can
be thought” – an eminence or excess of
thought or “saturated phenomenon” (to use
Jean-Luc Marion’s striking expression) not to
be confused with the full positivity of Truth
(as, in Anselm or Descartes, the ens perfectissi-
mum would be) – that implies some minimal
existence or, more precisely, some effaceable
“trace [Spur],” of its very beyond. Hence,
once again:
unless there is a kind of trace of truth in the
ontological proof of God, that is, unless the
moment of its reality [Wirklichkeit] is also
already conveyed in the power [Gewalt] of
the concept itself, there could not only be
no utopia but there could also not be any
thinking. (Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 16/367; trans. mod.)
Raising the question as to whether or to what
extent we, as humans, can and must “realize”
utopia through sheer efforts of will, even though
its most fundamental miracle – suspending the
 the antinomy of death
force that death has over us – does not depend on
us, in the end, Bloch makes an important pre-
cision, drawing on “hope,” on its very
“principle”:
In hope, we are dealing with perfection
[Volkommenheit], and to that extent with
the ontological proof of God. But the most
perfect being [substance or essence,
Wesen] is posited by Anselm as something
that at the same time includes the most
real [das Allerwirklichste]. That is not
defensible. But what is true is that each
and every criticism of imperfection
[Unvollkommenheit], incompletion [Unvol-
lendetem], the unbearable [Unerträgli-
chem], and the intolerable [nicht zu
Duldendem] without a doubt already pre-
supposes the representation of, and longing
for, a possible perfection. There would
otherwise not be any imperfection, when in
the process there would not be something
that should not be [das nicht sein sollte] –
when in the process perfection did not go
around, especially as a critical moment.
This much is certain […] hope is the oppo-
site of certainty, the opposite of some naive
optimism. In it, permanently, resides the
category of danger […] In the possible we
also find the opposite, in the possible there
lies also the thwarting [Vereitelung] […]
(Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 17/367)
As we noted earlier, Adorno, perhaps sur-
prisingly given his many qualms with Bloch’s
overall philosophical project and allergy with
respect to all too straightforwardly positive
theologoumena, offers a striking rejoinder:
“Yes, I believe that, too.” Yet he also hastens
to add that Bloch’s affirmative statement can
hardly mean that we rid ourselves of an incon-
trovertible given, which is the “heaviness of
death and everything that is connected to it.”
More precisely, he notes, the miracle that con-
travenes the reign of death should perhaps
not be seen so much as a physical or historical
event, violating the causal order of natural
and temporal things, as it is a perceptual
change in our practical attitudes rather than a
mere revision of our theoretical perspectives
(which would not suffice for the task): “the
matter here does not concern the elimination
of death as a scientific process in such a way
that one crosses the threshold between
organic and inorganic life through new discov-
eries” (Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 10/360). On the con-
trary, the reality and invocation of death no
less and no more than its miraculous undoing
regards addressing and redressing a symbolical
as well as social death that, in this sense, is not
quite final.
On Bloch and especially Adorno’s view,
then, we cannot envision or so much as consist-
ently think through the very “idea” of utopia
(“the utopia”), which without its corollary
notion of “an unfettered life, freed from
death” (Adorno and Bloch, “Something’s
Missing”/“Etwas fehlt” 10/360), would
remain merely empty, formal and abstract.
But this does not mean that we can, let alone
ought, forget the very “threshold” that death,
indeed, imposes.
It is this “heaviness of death and everything
that is connected to it” that explains the contra-
diction – or, we should say, self-contradiction –
of all plausible and responsible talk of death,
including of death not so much as biological
fact, but, as Adorno writes (with an almost
Pauline gesture), as “nothing other than the
power of that which merely is” (Adorno and
Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas fehlt”
10/361). This, nothing else, is the antinomy
or aporia of our attempt to “go beyond” the
powers, natural forces and social orders, that
be (10/361).
It is the contradiction of miraculously tran-
scending, if not thereby, once and for all, over-
coming death – all the while granting it its
ontological no less than historical, psychologi-
cal, and political weight – which, Adorno with
Bloch believes, forbids us to “cast a picture of
utopia in a positive manner”:
Every attempt to describe or portray utopia
in a simple way, i.e., it will be like this,
would be an attempt to avoid the antinomy
of death and to speak about the elimination
of death as if death did not exist. (Adorno
120

and Bloch, “Something’s Missing”/“Etwas
fehlt” 10/360)
(c) Having reviewed these two sources for his
negative or, rather, minimal metaphysics – the
inverted Spinozism of Adorno’s falsum index
sui et veri (falsity is the index of itself and of
truth and, accordingly, the negative totality
all by itself points already beyond itself), on
the one hand, and the borrowing of Anselm’s
unum argumentum or ontological argument,
which stipulates that deus index sui et veri
(God is the index of Himself and of truth and,
accordingly, the most utopian and least idola-
trous concept carries weight and all by itself
brings reality into the false world), on the
other, each of them, lest we forget, arguments
based on axioms, neither of which, one sus-
pects, can be maintained on strict philosophi-
cal, logically demonstrative grounds alone,
but rather at once follow and express a rhetori-
cal strategy of exaggeration or hyperbole, with
their apodictic statements turning things up a
notch – it is important to briefly review yet
another and even more challenging, third
reading, this time moving somewhat beyond
the letter, if not the spirit or, we might say,
“spiritual experience [geistige Erfahrung]” of
Adorno’s text.
In a sense, this third view merely conveys the
truth or consequence of the first two, even
though it hasn’t found much attention in the
vast (and still expanding) scholarship on
Adorno’s overall thinking (much of which
remains obsessed with the supposed differences
between his so-called neo-Hegelianism, neo-
Marxism, in any case, materialism and with
the naturalism of his more scientistic, that is,
logical positivist, as well as with down-to-earth
pragmatist contemporaries, to say nothing
here of the post-Wittgensteinian school of
ordinary language philosophy, whose early
beginnings Adorno witnessed as he studied, in
Oxford, with Gilbert Ryle).
In a nutshell, I would submit that the reason
Adorno both critiques and maintains the
thought of death and immortality has some-
thing to do with what could be called his deep
pragmatism. By this, I mean the sense and
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de vries
extent to which his most metaphysical medita-
tions remain struck by the sheer historical (con-
ceptual, figural, aesthetic, and affective) weight
of the religious and theological archive, whose
very ideas – and even central idea – it nonethe-
less seeks to submit to an ongoing process of
relentless secularization and profanation, mate-
rialization and realization; in short, by an inter-
pretative operation, translation, and
transformation, whose prospects remain uncer-
tain or, as it all too often seems, doomed to fail.
If the very idea that death has the last word
is, as he says, “inconceivable [unausdenkbar],”
then this means that immortality is – beyond
any banality of this often used and abused prag-
matist quip – what is, for now, for lack of a con-
ceptual alternative, better for us to believe, a
constructive and responsible move in the
game of “cultural politics.” More precisely, its
idea and supposed reference is what seems his-
torically, if not anthropologically, almost inevi-
table, given the sheer immensity and
traditional weightiness of its documentary and
testimonial archive, the affective grip of its im-
aginary, the rhetorical appeal of its idiom, and,
last but not least, the remaining – and still
ignored – systematic force and suggestiveness
of its organizing concepts.
This is not to say that the motif of – or the
motivation for and the movement towards –
immortality can receive eventual epistemic or
ontological backup from some “thesis concern-
ing immortality [Unsterblichkeitsthese],”
however defined. We are dealing with an idea
that like the other postulates of practical
reason of which Kant speaks – namely, the
existence of God and freedom – is “only of sig-
nificance for our actions,” in other words,
Adorno further summarizes, “not necessary
for our knowledge, that is, in theory.” True
enough, the idea of immortality also matters
for thought (at least on Adorno’s own
account, which moves beyond Kant’s so-called
“block” on reason). But, then, not all thought
is theoretical or, for that matter, non-contradic-
tory in any formal-abstract sense.
What Adorno claims is therefore, rather, that
– like the assumption of unavoidable and irre-
vocable death, including the “death” of the
 the antinomy of death
idea of immortality – the thought of immortal-
ity can be neither positively stated nor flatly,
that is, abstractly or fully, denied. It would be
more appropriate to say that only its rigorous,
that is to say, determinate negation salvages
its truth-content, its truth-moment. And this,
as a general rule or formal principle, holds
true of any theologoumenon. While nothing
traditional can remain the same, nothing can
– must or ought – be lost either.
Its peculiar affirmation – although, for
obvious reasons, Adorno refuses to use this
term (“affirmation”) or to deploy its straight-
forward propositional form and statement –
lies somehow elsewhere, to wit: in an aporeti-
cally expressed and, hence, precarious idea of
transcendence, which is received just as much
as it announces itself from within the infinite
– endless and near-absolute – expanses of
immanence, even though it ventures also
“beyond,” in the direction of the unknown.
Its proper dimension, therefore, is one of a
depth and laterality or futurity that is not –
no longer or not yet – of this world.
Recall the aphorism “Finale [Zum Ende]”
with which Minima Moralia concludes, and,
especially, its more than paradoxical, because
aporetic, punch line, which expresses a
“demand placed upon thought” to think what
is – strictly, that is, logical, ontologically speak-
ing – an impossibility (in its very object or
subject and this thought itself) “for the sake
of the possible,” without ever denying
conditionality:
Finale. – The only philosophy which can be
responsibly practiced in the face of despair is
the attempt to consider all things as they
would present themselves from the stand-
point of redemption. Knowledge has no
light but that shed on the world by redemp-
tion: all else is construction, mere technique.
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace
and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with
its rifts and fissures, as indigent and dis-
torted as it will appear one day in the messi-
anic light. To gain such perspectives without
velleity [caprice] or violence, entirely from
the felt contact with its objects – this alone
is the task of thought. It is the simplest of
things, because the situation calls irrefutably
for such cognition, indeed because com-
pleted negativity, once squarely faced, delin-
eates the mirror-writing [Spiegelschrift] of
its opposite. But it is also the utterly impos-
sible thing, because it presupposes a stand-
point removed, even though by a hair’s
breadth [ein Winziges], from the ban of
existence [Bannkreis des Daseins], whereas
we well know that any possible knowledge
must not only be wrested from what is, if it
shall hold good, but is also stricken [geschla-
gen], for this very reason, by the same dis-
tortion and indigence which it seeks to
escape. The more passionately thought
denies its conditionality for the sake of the
unconditional, the more unconsciously, and
so calamitously, it is delivered unto the
world [fällt es der Welt zu]. Even its own
impossibility it must at least comprehend
for the sake of the possible. But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the ques-
tion of the reality or unreality of redemption
[Wirklichkeit oder Unwirklichkeit der Erlö-
sung] itself hardly matters [ fast gleichgül-
tig]. (247/283; trans. mod.)
To this counter-factuality the aphorism
“Over the hills [Über den Bergen]” adds some
further background as it delineates the possibi-
lities for a hope-without-hope (“for the sake of
the hopeless,” as Benjamin had mused and as
Horkheimer had disparaged): a hope that pre-
vails amidst the greatest despair and, in this,
resembles Bloch’s injunction, summarizing
the trilogy of Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Prin-
ciple of Hope), of the “principle in spite of
everything [Prinzip Trotz alledem]” (qtd in
Münster, Ernst Bloch 243):
So, when we are hoping for rescue
[Rettung], a voice tells us that hope is in
vain, yet it is powerless hope alone that
allows us to draw a single breath. All contem-
plation [Kontemplation] can do no more
than patiently trace the ambiguity of melan-
choly [Zweideutigkeit der Wehmut] in ever
new configurations. Truth is inseparable
from the illusory belief [Wahn] that from
the figures of the unreal [Figuren des
Scheins] one day, in spite of all [einmal
doch], deliverance [Rettung] will step
122

forth. (Adorno, Minima Moralia 121–22/
137; trans. mod.)
Even to think hope, Adorno says elsewhere, in
Negative Dialectics, also works against it. But
that does not disparage hope as such, much
less its very “spirit,” which is likewise wrested
away from what denies and demeans it. And
this, nothing more, nothing less, may well be
the form and figure that “the spiritual” and
“spiritual experience” must presently take. It
must necessarily as well imperatively do so, in
Adorno’s view, in what is still very much our
modernity, an epoch whose fundamentally con-
tingent condition may have predated its histori-
cal period just as it may very well outlast it.
Schematically and concretely, Bloch would
characterize this invocation of hope in the follow-
ing apodictic statement: “If there would be no
utopia, there would be nothing out there but
the having-been-there [Wäre keine Utopie, so
wäre nichts da als das Dagewesensein]” (qtd
in Münster, Ernst Bloch 243). In other words,
outpacing both Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zar-
athustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and Heideg-
ger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and their
musings on the “having-been-there,” Bloch’s
sense of future-oriented hope of utopia, of the
“not yet,” not unlike Adorno’s, dispenses with
the mere pastness of the past as that which has
solidified (or, in Marxian terms, reified) and nor-
malized itself and, in this, stultifies us to this
very day. What has been or merely is thereby
loses its hold and prerogative over us and, in
so doing, frees us up for the present and its “day-
dreams of the upright gait.”10
The 1963 afterword to the second, revised
edition of Bloch’s 1923 The Spirit of Utopia suc-
cinctly formulates its organizing “principle,”
which is more fully laid out in the trilogy
under the title The Principle of Hope written
from 1938 through 1945 during his exile in the
United States and in subsequent writings: “The
world is untrue but it wants to return home
through man and through truth,” while adding
that to the present world’s “evil” there is no
better response than “revolutionary gnosis”
(279/347).11 The latter is deemed to emerge
and can be gleaned from a sprawling spectrum
123
de vries
and vivid panorama of phenomena, which
Bloch tirelessly collected and interpreted as
part of his “encyclopedia of the contents of
hope” that evince “Dreams of the Better Life
[Träume vom besseren Leben],” the originally
planned title for the trilogy (a representative
segment of which would be published earlier in
1946, in German, still in the United States,
under the title Freiheit und Ordnung. Abriss
der Sozialutopien [Freedom and Order: An
Outline of Social Utopias], thus demonstrating
that the spirit of such dream worlds had an
intrinsically collective component) (Münster,
Ernst Bloch 236, 247).
For Bloch – and this may be the Baroque,
Sturm und Drang, Romantic, and Late Expres-
sionist streak of this “Marxist Schelling” – hope
is “something linked not just to optimism but
to the tendencies present in a material world
that is constantly in flux” (Thompson 3).12
Hence, the experimentum mundi, to cite
Bloch’s concept and book title, is internal to
the world, a “logic of matter” itself.
By contrast, Adorno – and I have followed
him in this throughout – does not start out or,
for that matter, end with this all too tra-
ditional-theoretical and, hence, insufficiently
Critical-Theoretical assumption, whose explicit
formulation lies at the heart of Bloch’s overall
philosophical project and whose implicit
acknowledgment informs so much of naturalist,
realist, and, fundamentally, conformist think-
ing. After all, no matter how much Bloch’s
Marxism is one of revolutionary, at once mysti-
cal, messianic, and apocalyptic – indeed,
heretic and antinomian – urgency and insurrec-
tion, its most deeply held axiom is that, in pur-
suing its “traces [Spuren]” throughout human
history, encyclopedically archiving and remobi-
lizing its spiritual energies, the historical materi-
alist is, speculatively and politically, “swimming
with the tide.” To borrow this scathing indict-
ment from Benjamin’s eleventh “Thesis on the
Concept of History” – directed against the
Social Democratic movement, not Bloch whose
Spirit of Utopia he greatly admired and cites
approvingly – may seem unfair. After all,
Bloch defended himself against the accusations
of “reformism” almost to a fault.13 And to rely
 the antinomy of death
on so much as immanent potentialities, the logoi
spermatikoi, the experimentum mundi, in sum,
the logos of matter, is not quite the same as trust-
ing the historical teleology, determinism and
mechanicism of the Second International and
its vulgar Marxism, much less the “Diamat” of
the Stalinist apparatchiks and nomenklatura.
Moreover, Bloch’s view may be closer to what
Benjamin, in the same “Theses,” calls “a weak
messianic force [eine schwache messianische
Kraft].” Yet the suspicion persists: the “ontol-
ogy of not-yet-being” remains, qua ontology,
rooted in being, in its pulsating energy and
forward thrust. And this is a view Adorno
cannot but reject.
As much as he insisted that Bloch’s philos-
ophy and person was irrevocably bound up
with his own “spiritual existence [geistigen
Existenz],” when asked, in 1958, about endor-
sing the plan to republish The Principle of
Hope he characterized it as “simply poor in
spiritual content [arm einfach an geistigem
Gehalt]” (qtd in Schiller 36), while acknowled-
ging in later homage, from 1965, that the first
edition of Spirit of Utopia he had read as a
seventeen-year-old student had accompanied
him ever since:
The book, Bloch’s first, bearing all his later
work within it, seemed to me to be one pro-
longed rebellion [Revolte] against the renun-
ciation [Versagung] within thought that
extends even into its purely formal character.
Prior to any theoretical content, I think this
motif so much as my own that I do not
believe I have ever written anything without
reference to it, either implicit or explicit.14
(Adorno, “Handle”/“Henkel” 212/557)
But the revolt in and of thinking, for Adorno,
takes a different form and aims for a different
restitution of all things.
More Kantian than Schellingian than Bloch
with respect to utopia in its very principle and
idea as well as in overall contours, Adorno
believes that if we deny or refuse despair and
ward off nihilism as both existentially and intel-
lectually as well as politically unthinkable
(unausdenkbar) – in fact, as untenable or unliv-
able, which is not the same as “overcoming”
nihilism once and for all – only then we may
hope that the world and its stirrings may yet
do their share and, as it were, meet us
halfway. But, metaphysically and ethically or
politically, we can and must not count on this
ever. Neither a deliberate (Pascalian) wager
nor a dialectical (Hegelian) mediation will
help us out, much less resolve our situation
by one calculated move, preordained in the
larger Providential or Promethean scheme of
things or, indeed, once and for all. The world
as it presently is in its actual state, together
with its presumed “tendencies” must, for all
theoretical and practical purposes, be con-
sidered as nothing more or else than a negative
or false totality, as a whole that is untrue. The
logos of matter or merely the logoi spermatikoi
left for us to find and rekindle, if for a moment
we can assume their actual or
virtual existence at all, can
from here on hardly be seen as
vestiges, much less, the guaran-
tors of hope (and, perhaps,
never were).
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
1 See, for a discussion, my Minimal Theologies.
2 As Peter Gordon comments in “Adorno’s
Secular Theology”:
It would be absurd, of course, to imagine that
Adorno actually adheres to the doctrine of
corporeal resurrection in the literal sense.
One cannot ignore the epigram from Epi-
charmus that he selected to stand at the
head of his 1956 study of Husserl, Zur Meta-
kritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistem-
ology): “Mortals must think mortal
thoughts.” That Adorno assigned some
importance to this epigram is evident
insofar as even a decade later in his lectures
on negative dialectics he paused to quote it
once again. In a characteristically dialectical
gesture, however, Adorno offers a further
124

comment: “We should add, perhaps, that
only in the categories of the finite, or to
follow Epicharmus, only by speaking of
mortal thoughts, can immortal thoughts be
grasped, whereas every attempt to compre-
hend transcendence in other categories is
doomed from the outset.”
3 This motif of universal restoration still leaves
ample room for several interpretations. It is
tempting to surmise that, in its full logic and theo-
logical consequence, the restitutio omnium is not so
much a return to a putative original state, whether
that of the paradisiacal Garden of Eden or the
Kingdom of ancient Israel. Furthermore, its motif
does not just extend to “all” but to “all things,”
past, present, and future. And while Martin
Luther, in his translation of the passage, saw the
restitution and redress as a “bringing back,” its
more compelling, yet no doubt heterodox, rendi-
tion takes it to include all that was and is or will be
eternally possible.
4 See Jennings and Ramelli.
5 See my “‘The Other Theology’” and “Inverse
versus Dialectical Theology.”
6 For a discussion, see my “‘The Miracle of Love’”
and, for a fuller elaboration of the argument, my
Miracles et métaphysique and Le miracle au coeur
de l’ordinaire.
7 For a discussion, see my “On the ‘Spiritual’ in
Aesthetic Experience.”
8 On Bloch, see Levinas, La mort et le temps, God,
Death, and Time, lectures of Friday, 23 April,
Friday, 30 April, as well as of Friday, 7 May 1976.
9 It is wrongheaded, therefore, to claim, as does
Martin Hägglund in This Life: Secular Faith and Spir-
itual Freedom, that Adorno “conflates a secular
promise of freedom (the liberation of finite life)
with a religious promise of salvation (the liberation
from finite life)” (35, 315, cf. 325ff.). It is the philo-
sophical rejection of the abstract opposition
between finitude and infinity, plus the realization
that death, especially “after Auschwitz,” can on
moral grounds no longer be seen as a necessary
condition of human fallibility, much less as an inte-
gral part or ultimate horizon of meaningful life due
to the extreme – useless and unjustifiable – suffer-
ing of so many (emblematized by the victims of
anti-Semitism), that marks Adorno’s late thought
as its deepest. Infinity or eternity are neither
125
de vries
assumed nor postulated in traditional theological
and utopian terms, as if they constituted positive
or future actualities. Rather, they are introduced
and seen as modalities and virtualities of an exist-
ence (a life) here and now that, under present con-
ditions of both thought and practice, are
impossible or paradoxical, more precisely, apore-
tic through and through. To decry such motifs as
“unintelligible” is, precisely, to miss the point, car-
rying owls to Athens. Adorno says explicitly that
we are dealing here with a categorical imperative
for thought and agency, which is to renounce
“despair” by insisting on its “unthinkability [Unaus-
denkbarkeit der Verzweiflung]” and instead to yield
to an “unintelligible commitment [uneinsichtige Ver-
bindlichkeit].” Yet the latter motif at the heart of
“freedom,” yields anything but epistemic certainty,
as Adorno makes abundantly clear in Against Epis-
temology. Its counter-factuality and fallible nature
turns its assumption into much less than a “postu-
late” (i.e., a theoretically less than ascertained
claim) of practical reason:
Only in freedom is spirit [Geist] capable of
filling and reconciling itself with what it let
go. An element of uncertainty comes over
spirit lest it does not dissolve into mere
assertion [Beteuerung]. Freedom itself is
never given and constantly menaced. The
absolutely certain as such, however, is
always unfreedom. The requirement to
indulge in certainty works, like all force
[Zwang], at its own destruction. (Adorno,
Against Epistemology 16/23–24; trans. mod.)
The task, then, is not to settle for less than is pos-
sible in principle and de facto, even though there is
little doubt that historical and present conditions
did and do not yet allow for just, much less
utopian aspirations to be met. Utopian motifs and
motivations, like those of their prophetic and mes-
sianic, eschatological and apocalyptic, gnostic and
Marcionite, mystic and antinomian precursors and
counterparts, do not so much represent the
latter day Schwärmerei or melancholy of either
enthusiastic or disillusioned leftists as they present
a genuine reaction and resistance to all that exists
and is justified in these terms (“it is what it is and
has to be”). They offer an at once metaphysical or
speculative and pragmatically relevant, if virtual,
alternative to the negative (i.e., untrue, unjust)
totality that, so far, serves as our “ban” and
“block” for thought and action, as Adorno sees it.
This argument ex negativo is, precisely, what it
 the antinomy of death
means to say, in paradoxical – or, rather, aporetic –
terms, inverting Hegel’s well-known dictum “Das
Ganze ist das Wahre,” and retorting: “Das Ganze
ist das Unwahre.” It is obvious that such a counter-
argument yields itself no positive affirmation of
any kind. But the abstraction of its claim is not,
thereby, vacuous or in vain. On the contrary,
even in the most minimal distance and disengage-
ment thus signaled, a maximal effect or massive
impact may well become manifest: an apokatastasis
ton pantoon or restitutio in integrum.
10 See Arno Münster, Tagträume vom aufrechten
Gang.
11 For a discussion of the “neo-Gnostic spirit” and
its reception in the Weimar and post-World War II
context, see Mendes-Flohr and Styfhals. For the
expression “neo-Gnostic spirit,” see Lazier.
12 The characterization of Bloch as a “Marxist
Schelling” I borrow from Jürgen Habermas’s 1960
essay, republished in idem, Philosophisch-Politische
Profile (141–59); “Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,”
in Philosophical-Political Profiles (61–78). On Haber-
mas’s critical discussion of Bloch, also with reference
to the latter’s “cosmology” and the Schellingian
motif of a “resurrection of nature,” see Yos.
13 See Münster, Ernst Bloch 284ff.
14 See also Schopf 297–300. Another important
influence at the time is the 1920 Theorie des
Romans of whose author, Georg Lukács, Adorno
writes in a 1925 letter to Alban Berg that he “has
influenced [him, Adorno] spiritually [geistig] more
deeply than anyone else” (qtd in Schiller 42).
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Hent de Vries
Department of Religious Studies
New York University
726 Broadway, Suite 554
New York, NY 10003
USA
E-mail: hentdevries@nyu.edu