Chapter 3- Theodor Adorno and Negative Dialectics

Theodor Adorno has long had the reputation of a thinker whose work concentrates on the influence of thought on society and its structures. Central to his most famous composition, Negative Dialectics1, is a critical method which leads one through a critique of society and its structures to a type of direction that brings the reader to a more affective reading within that critique, where critique becomes song. The melody central to Adorno's approach in Negative Dialectics is that of suffering. This melody is towering, and leads through the effort of the criticism in the book, to the Philosophy of negative dialectics, to what Adorno calls the threshold of tragic sympathy.
The purpose of this essay is to recompose Adorno's sense of the influence of thought on suffering in Negative dialectics, and to show parallels in the direction of his philosophy presented in the text with tragic sympathy. First I attempt to present the manner in which Negative Dialectics as philosophical method is a valid approach to understanding. As this unfolds I show parallels to Kant2 that provide the reader with one of the historical antecedents of Adorno's contribution and gives evidence for what Adorno calls his 'axial turn' to the 2nd Copernican revolution.
Next I focus on elements in Adorno's criticism of Heidegger which show the import of the influence of his thought on suffering and thus contributes to the somber tone of Negative Dialectics. Then I show how Adorno's text converges in on, and then pivots on the origin of communication as existentially and thus experientially rooted and also having the form of a moral imperative. This occurs in his treatment of what Adorno calls suffering physical. These elements have distinct parallels to the structure of tragic sympathy. It is at this point that we show a convergence of Adorno's thinking with the Deliverance Within the Tragic, in the tragic sympathy examined by Paul Ricoeur in the Symbolism of Evil3. Let us begin with an investigation of why it is called Negative Dialectics, and how it can be a valid method towards understanding.
Why is it called Negative Dialectics? The movement of knowledge for Hegel was one of unifying particular experiences and objects within the manifold under universals, in order to have a connected experience. For Hegel this was the problem of knowledge itself, and the direction of movement was from particular to universal. It is the process of making an identity between a concept and a particular. Negative Dialectics distinguishes differences between a universal and a particular, dictated by the universal, by recognizing the emergence of elements that cannot be exhausted by the concept. thus there is a fundamental lack in the structure of each and every concept. The direction of dialectics, the synthetic movement from particular to universal is reversed. The movement now proceeds from universal to particular, particular. The general term Adorno uses for this process is 'determinate negation.'
Originated as a response to the fallen Hegelian philosophy, Negative Dialectics takes primary aim at revealing the oppressive structure of identity thinking. Adorno shows that concepts do not go into their objects without leaving a remainder. Although many instances are treated by Adorno, the paradigmatic instance of identity thinking which Adorno uses to base his critique on is found in the section on the critique of positive negation.

Oscillating between the most profound insight and the collapse of that insight is Hegel's line: "Truth also is positive, as knowledge coinciding with the object, but it is this self-sameness only if knowledge has reacted negatively to the other, if it has penetrated the object and has voided the negation which it is."
The qualification of truth as a negative reaction on the part of the knowledge that penetrates the object--in other words: extinguishes the appearance of the object being directly as it is-- sounds like a program of negative dialectics as a knowledge "coinciding with the object." But the establishment of this knowledge as positivity abjures that program. By the formula of "self-sameness," of pure identity, the knowledge of the object is shown up as hocus-pocus, because this knowledge is no longer one of the object at all: it is the tautology of an absolutized .. Irreconcilably, the idea of reconcilement bars its affirmation in a concept.4 pg. 160

For Kant, similarly, to subsume a given particular under a universal that we already possess is a determinate judgment. To find a universal that we do not possess, for a particular that is given, is a reflective judgment. The critique of what it means to say that 'something is black' or that 'something is beautiful' from a reflective standpoint leaves room between the two types of judgment for activity. It is on this pivot, this bifurcation of judgment that Adorno gives the second Copernican revolution an axial turn. For what is at stake for Adorno is the structure of synthetic judgment, and his turn will have a qualitative effect on the essence of what it means to make a determinant judgment. We will thus attempt to find in Kant the parallels that warrant Adorno's axial turn.
For Adorno, then, concepts refer to what is properly non-conceptual. They make an identity with something non-identical to them. This establishes a unity in experience and enable us to connect experience into the sequence of meaning. There is then a contradiction immanent in the very presentation of Negative Dialectics- how can we present a unity if we seek to dismantle unity?, if we seek to show differences?
For Adorno, this process of determinate negation occurs in an activity he terms “discrimination”.5 Discrimination is first an activity that distinguishes differences at the micrological level. Secondly, discrimination accomplishes this through the experience of an object turned into a form of what Adorno calls subjective reaction.
In the first sub-moment, discrimination is the distinguishing of differences at the micrological level. Discrimination accomplishes this through the disintegration of the relation of affinity between a previous set of concept and object. This occurs when the element of nonidentity with the concept emerges in reflection, and in resistance to identity, and explodes the subsuming cover concept. It is the disintegration of antiquated affinity in the identifying process. It is why negative dialectics is called a logic of disintegration. It seems here that the process of disintegration leads one into an infinite series of determinate negations concerned with an ever smaller object of knowledge- minimalism. Another charge leveled has been that negative dialectics is only a philosophy of destruction in an attempt to portray the world of the Jewish European of W.W.II. However discrimination in the first moment of discrimination is accomplished through the second activity of discrimination, where elements of a experience begin to unify and meaning emerges.
In the second aspect of discrimination, as the experience of the object turned into a form of subjective reaction, there is further reduction into complementing sub-moments. The first moment is a moment of extension towards the non-identical in a mimetic movement that destroys both the organization character of the previous instance of discrimination and the previous mimetic arrangement;6 while simultaneously finding likeness in the non-identical element. The second moment is one that logically relates these non-identities into a rational unity. These two moments of the synthetic function of discrimination thus gather non-identical remainder particles to form new models.

Even in the conception of rational knowledge, devoid of all affinity, there survives a groping for that concordance which the magical delusion used to place beyond doubt. If this moment were extinguished altogether, it would be flatly incomprehensible that a subject can know an object; the unleashed rationality would be irrational. In being secularized, however, the mimetic element in turn blends with the rational one. The word for this process is discrimination. It contains the faculty of mimetic reaction as well as the logical organ for the relation of genus, species, and differentia specifica. pg. 45 7

Discrimination thus disintegrates and unifies simultaneously. For Adorno, if the thinker becomes aware of the nature of the contradiction involved in arriving at a concept, at arriving at a unified experience, if the thinker reflects upon this process of determinate negation in the act of a particular judgment, then the thinker has begun to think in a manner befitting a negative dialectics. Further elements of Adorno's thought point toward unified experience, this can be found in the notions of constellation, reconcilement, and happiness.
In Adorno's notion of constellation, the lack in each concept leads it to refer to other concepts,8 and thus in a unity of reference, concepts together illuminate the specific side of the object, the side cut away by the violent identifying activity of the concept. The model for this is the conduct of language, for Adorno. In the interrelation of the stasis of conceptual identification and the dynamics of reference to other concepts, we can know the object completely. Although the process is one of disintegrating and unifying at the conceptual level, it is one of dynamic unity at the level of the constellation, or the sentence level. It is a way for us to make binding statements in a logic of disintegration and thus have a unified experience.

To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others. pg. 25 9

To perceive the individual moment in its connection with others not only shows a dynamic schema in this mode of understanding,10 it limits the authority of the subject position in the constellation. the result of this is a recognition of value among all the members of the constellation. Thus value can be seen as deriving not from the subject but with the subject in relation to objects. Another element of unified experience is present in his notion of reconcilement.
The reconcilement of the concept and object, for Adorno, can come about by the subject releasing the non-identical element in the concept by tolerating differences between the identical and non-identical.11 But reconcilement does not occur in a single concept, for Adorno. The idea of reconcilement in a single concept is violence because reconcilement in the concept is always a unilateral affair. It is an attempt to negate the non-identical and to make it identical. The attempt is thus totalitarian. Rather reconcilement for Adorno is found where the subject coincides with the object, and thus an objective element is needed for reconcilement to occur. where we experience reconcilement and unity is combined in feeling and completion, in a coinciding of our thinking with objective reality. The indication that reconcilement can occur is located in a feeling, in Adorno's notion of happiness.

Happiness, the only part of metaphysical experience that is more than impotent longing, gives us the inside of objects as something removed from the objects. pg. 374 12

Happiness gives us the inside of objects, but it is also a sensual fulfillment which obtains its objectivity in that fulfillment.13 Thus we have a unity of experience, but it is not experienced subjectively, because for Adorno, reconcilement is objectively experienced and also sympathetically felt.
There are parallels in this presentation with Kant's presentation of sub-conceptual combination in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. The second activity of discrimination mentioned earlier has a strong parallel with the presentation of now men communicate their thoughts in the third critique.

The skill that men have in communicating their thoughts requires also a relation between the imagination and the understanding in order to associate intuitions with concepts, (Adorno's mimetic element) and concepts again with those concepts, (Adorno's rational moment) which then combine in a cognition. pg. 138 14

These complementing functions of associating intuitions with concepts, and then these concepts with other concepts, have the same structure as the structure of Adorno's second aspect of discrimination. Kant later elaborates this process towards the formation of cognition. The aesthetical idea in Kant serves in a similar role as that of Adorno's mimetic moment in discrimination as the object turned into a subjective form of reaction.15 The rational concept in Kant serves in a similar function to that of Adorno's moment of logical relation, logically organizing the symbolic framework with concepts to form an aesthetical cognition. In the aesthetic context the passive estimation by the individual of the artistic object conveys the accord of the imagination and the understanding. The feeling of this accord, for Kant, is beauty. However the act of aesthetic judgment is a passive estimation of the object in a free play of the cognitive faculties, and the rightness that we feel in the estimation of the beautiful object is due to the accord of the judgment and the understanding in passive estimation. So how can this presentation of Kant be a turn toward the non-identical in effort that both disintegrates and unifies? Because this presentation is located not in the reflective estimation of an object, but in the act of aesthetic production.
In aesthetic production, what does the artist estimate? It is not an object per se, that the artist estimates because the object has not materialized. The artist has estimated other objects in the past for the hope of finding a direction, but a direction in what? In aesthetic production there is a turn toward the non-identical, where the estimation of past objects and the ordering that arises from such estimation by the artist is used to discover sense in an estimation of the supersensible, in an estimation of the noumena. Kant writes:

It(poetry) strengthens the mind by making it feel its faculty- free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination- of considering and judging nature as a phenomenon in accordance with aspects which it does not present in experience either for sense or understanding, and therefore of using it on behalf of, and as a sort of schema for the supersensible. pg. 53-54 16

In the act of aesthetic production, not discussed up to now by Kant, the artist's hand reaches to picture the noumena and creates in sense, realizes to sense, a 'manifold example’17- the material element- the hitherto non-identical element- the aesthetical attribute that conveys the aesthetical idea. The aesthetical idea is not associated with a definite concept, but is conveyed by a surrogate framework, the symbol.
In aesthetic production, passive estimation of the object is turned into estimation of the noumena, and this realization of felt purposiveness is a transposition of sense through practice. Thus Kant's notion of beauty from the position of the artist finds it completion through an objective manner, in a realizing to sense-through labor, in a transposition of judgment and understanding through reason. It is a practice in the middle voice sense. Not static like a pre-formed concept and not disinterested like mere reflection, the activity of the artist is more akin to a 'rendering born', both active and receptive. It is not a concept, nor a reflection, but a conceiving. Kant first elaborates, and Adorno then expands upon what may be called a crude phenomenology of the miracle of birth, in a practical sense. The object then through the aesthetical attribute, must possess something that conveys the aesthetical idea; i.e. subjective purposiveness; to us in it's objective markings independent of the presence of the artist.
After the artist has produced, his object speaks to us, in the form of the beautiful object, the feeling of which is beauty. Thus beauty for Kant, is the experience of the accord of the subjective faculties, but in relation to objective impetus. Although only implied in Kant, this notion of objective communication, the object's dynamism, is recognized by Adorno, who writes;

What the objects communicate in-....-is the trace of the objects definition in themselves, pg. 25 18

Adorno's notion of completeness does not originate solely from the subject, but realizes itself in an objective manner. Kant's notion of beauty, although shown by Kant to occur as an effect in the subject, comes to be only in relation to an object, the object that is the realization of art. The turn to non-identity is present not only in the incomplete character of the complementing functions of cognitive formation in the aesthetic judgment, but in the direction of concept-making. In the realizing to sense of an intuition, the artist reworks reality and brings about a new order. The aesthetical idea is the feeling of the artist extending into the supersensible and returning what it has found in symbolic form. It is the feeling of the returning of the non-identical element.
The feeling of beauty in Kant is parallel to one aspect of Adorno's presentation of reconcilement as happiness, as giving us the inside of objects, as a feeling of completeness and rightness. But the presentation of happiness as also sensual fulfillment ; as fulfillment of suffering is not present in Kant's presentation of aesthetic judgment in the third critique. Kant's presentation also does not account for the violence of the synthetic function in the mimetic activity of the subject.19 For now two distinctions between the philosophies of Kant and Adorno are found in happiness as the negation of suffering, and in the violent character of the dynamics of affinity.

All pain and all negativity, the moving forces of dialectical thinking, assume the variously conveyed, sometimes unrecognizable form of physical things, just as all happiness aims at sensual fulfillment. A happiness blocked off from every such aspect is no happiness. pg. 202 20

Nevertheless we have presented evidence can provide a unified experience, and we have explored how it is that Adorno's claim to give the second Copernican revolution an axial turn has merit. So with reference to this rudimentary understanding of the functioning of a negative dialectics, and in relation to its affinities with Kant of the third critique, how have I arrived at this analysis?
As Adorno unfolds the universal to the particular in his criticism and in his philosophy, he stops at points where the critical method yields to phenomena. It is at these points that he shows the influence of thought on suffering. It is at these points that Adorno shows that reconcilement does not simply end the matter, but is momentary. It is this aspect of Adorno's philosophy that conditions the manner of negative dialectics as not merely haphazard, but directs it to the threshold of tragic sympathy. These points in the text reflect the primary object of critique for Adorno, the relationship between need and thinking-

But thinking, itself a mode of conduct, contains the need, the vital need, at the outset- in itself. The need is what we think from, even when we disdain wishful thinking. The motor of the need is the effort that involves thought as action. The object of critique is not the need in thinking, but the relationship between the two. pg. 408 21

I now turn to the examination of Adorno's criticism and his philosophy following this line of inquiry. I will begin by presenting four examples of the influence of thought on suffering in Adorno's criticism of identity thinking. The first and most famous example of the influence of thought on suffering in Negative Dialectics is the spell cast by the subject in the false identity of subject and object in idealistic conceptual construction. By virtue of the subject's dynamic nature, the subject endows the object with qualities, and the with the character, of a thing that has a life of its own.22 This is due, for Adorno, by acceptance of the concept in a static manner during the occasion of thought, solidifying the appearance of the thing in the hope of a permanence.23 This develops a polarization of subject and object into dynamic subject and static object that combine to show four instance of false consciousness for Adorno in the interaction of subject and object. The totalitarian and the abstract are instances from the domain of the subject while the barbarous and the lifeless are the instances in the domain of the object.
In the first instance identity thinking polarizes the subject and object, and thus does not recognize the permeation that occurs in their interaction. In one instance of this polarization according to Adorno, the subject sees itself as wholly dynamic and thus wholly legislative, wholly magisterial. In this instance of false consciousness the subject focuses on its generating ability, and has mistaken this generating ability for all there is. The subject says what the object is, and in this surge does not yield to the material of the object, the subject does not listen. Its saying is thus by decree and its affirmation is not a balanced listening from a source of heterogeneity, but is an affirmation of 'because I say so'. The subject has become totalitarian,24 the concept has become ideology.
In the second instance the correlate of this particular false consciousness is that in the focus of its self-dynamism, the subject is carried by the specter and the momentum of its dynamism and does not perceive this action as mediated. In the faith in this self-dynamism, the subject has lost hold of that which balances the thinking force of the subject, heterogeneity. Life becomes wholly abstract25 when the self-focusing subject has lost the aggression of its magisterial side. what becomes of the object in this system of identity?
In the correlate to the first instance of the totalitarian subject, the object as shown by Adorno, is treated as a lifeless entity, a dead piece of matter to be formed, ruled, and dominated. Edicts are delivered as to what the object is and should be, and efforts are put forth to coerce the object to conform. In this urge to make alive, in this effort to incorporate the object into the system, the distance of tolerance, of heterogeneity, is eliminated. The object is under attack. For the object this burden is not seen as emanating from an action, but from a system, and thus it becomes a condition is seen as inevitable, as inescapable. The condition becomes as life for the object.26 It is a false life within reality.
The instances of false consciousness of the barbarous and the lifeless come into view when elements of non-identity emerge from the object. They have the effect of dislodging, of an imbalance of the ungrounded subject. These elements appear as something which we wish to go away, as something which with we cannot cope. The predominant faith of the subject here is in the objects as we have made them and as we think they are, objects are then foreign, something other, something barbarous. For the totalitarian subject, the object becomes an instigating adversary, for the subject in vertigo, the object becomes wholly concrete, the source of despair and impending doom.
In the next example Adorno criticizes Heidegger for developing a philosophy whose definitions block the memory of the miseries of humankind.27 This is accomplished by Heidegger, according to Adorno, in his insistence of 'Being" as having the property of resistance to definition. This resistance to definition acts as a blinding mechanism28 by which the subject is unable to reach a clarity. Heidegger's construction points to a mythical superiority beyond the real human miseries that constitute an element of this so-called superiority, and thus beyond these miseries and their memory, finally away from suffering.
In our third example of Adorno's criticism of Heidegger, Adorno takes aim at what he calls Heidegger's 'Ontologization of the Ontical'. According to Adorno the move to ontologize the Ontical is a blatant move to eliminate otherness within Heidegger's existential scheme. By showing the Ontical as an element of the ontological, Heidegger strikes the pose of a philosophy by identity in the manner of the authoritarian. It's focus is on dynamic characteristics of the Ontical that are translated into a function of the ontological, and thereafter has no opposing element to balance the purified assertion. The philosophy thus becomes the most horrible of affirmations, the affirmation of sheer power.
The example we shall present lastly, is Adorno's criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula. Adorno criticizes Heidegger for taking the sense of 'is' in each particular synthetic judgment, and then raising it to a principle of synthesis generally. Adorno points out that the synthesis cannot occur but in particular judgments and in particular circumstances. Thus Heidegger's move to raise the element of synthesis to a principle without a context is an ignorance of the value of particulars in a particular judgment. For Adorno there is no real synthesis without the elements of subject-synthesis-predicate. Heidegger thus, for Adorno, is caught in a move of reified thinking by raising 'is' to a general principle of synthesis by decree. This false elevation of the synthetic element binds us from these particular moments by pointing to the mythical brighter light of synthesis without context of the real. It is thus totalitarian. I will now move to show how elements of Adorno's philosophy add to this reading of negative dialectics as being at the threshold of tragic sympathy.
The first element of Adorno's philosophy that points us toward tragic sympathy is in his analysis of suffering physical. In the analysis of suffering physical Adorno makes a claim which both raises existence to the form of an imperative and also gives existence a tragic pose.

The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. pg. 202 31

In this statement, existence affirms itself but only in a movement to negate an aspect of its being. It shows existence as a being-towards in a buried nature, which emerges in the labor to language. The 'ought' is derived from a negative form of 'is', from a lack in being itself which reaches outward and demands of others, that carries a kernel of action, an imperative to both sympathy and action. We can see existence as an affirmation, through negation in this claim if we can agree that suffering is a form of non-being, of death itself, and of disempowerment. This can be seen in the example of non-being that we have in the death of a loved one, where our experience of non-being is felt as loss of experience. Therefore the affirmation of existence is carried in a negative, and thus can be seen as a transposition from non-being to being, as human existence and action itself is a movement away from suffering. The affirmation of being as away from non-being must be unearthed and resurrected through a negative. Here Adorno roots purposiveness in human existence. This principle of communication can be seen as a heuristic principle according to need32.
In the sense that existence is directional for Adorno, in this notion that 'suffering ought not to be', is seen the emergence of purposiveness in negative dialectics while simultaneously being the emergence of speech as both imperative and conduct toward others. Existence, for Adorno, is directional outside of itself. It has the form of a cry. In this principle of communication , in this transposition of suffering to sympathy, Adorno roots existentially what Kant proposes as hypothesis, and thus maintains in a supersensible orbit. That is the possibility of the origin of communication, the sensus communis.

Now this common sense cannot be grounded on experience, for it aims at justifying judgments which contain an ought. It does not say that everyone will agree with my judgment, but that he ought. pg. 76 Critique of Judgment 33

The sensus communis is at the basis for the possibility of communication, for Kant, which we must possess or communication could not occur. But for Kant the common sense is not found in experience, but in a supposition, and is thus the possibility of communication which is derived after the fact.34 Kant argues that 'we must possess a common sense because we do communicate'. Kant's common sense is thus a pure intellectual notion with an undefined supersensible axis. Although physical suffering as a driving force to thought is not thematic in the third critique, the notion of lack is present. The want of accordance that characterizes the feeling of the sublime35, and the feeling of incapacity characterizes respect36, both leave the underlying framework of what can be considered the proper ground, the proper impetus of a moral action wholly negative. There is a parallel here in that Adorno describes his notion of suffering physical as having the characteristic of incompleteness. Thus lack is central in both Philosopher's structure of thought and willed action. To show the congruence more clearly between the supersensible orbit of the unity of the faculties, with the existential axis of Adorno's emergence of language, a presentation of the influence of physical suffering on Kant's notion of the supersensible as unity is in order, which I will take up in a following essay.
Adorno simultaneously roots not only the origin of communication but the notion of imperative in an existential manner, in an experience that speaks. The origin of communication not only emerges from human existence in a rising above sense, but emerges with a twofold imperative imbedded in it's axis, the imperative to sympathy of suffering, and also an imperative to eliminate suffering. Human existence reaches outside itself towards others as speech in the imperative and as the indication of sympathy with the imperative of sympathy. In this manner of rooting the common sense existentially, Adorno attempts to bring concreteness and unity to a fundamental supersensible notion of Kant- the twofold condition, and unity, of humanity as communicative and sympathetic.

.., probably because humanity on the one side indicates the universal feeling of sympathy, and on the other the faculty of being able to communicate universally our inmost (feelings). pg. 201 CJ 37

Therefore communication, for Adorno emerges from a lack, a negative, but it is in the sharing of this lack that the lack is negated. This reconcilement is contingent for Adorno, but it has a model in the 'conduct of language'. In the conduct of language in constellation, we possess the model for reconcilement. Thus constellation is another element of unified experience in Negative Dialectics.
The individual lack inherent in the nature of the concept necessarily lends it to refer to others. It is thus in constellation, in the mutual sharing of lack; in the sympathy that suffering ought not to be that the object can be wholly known and reconcilement can occur. Adorno writes-


More essential, however, is that to which Weber gives the name of "composing", a name which orthodox scientivists would find unacceptable. He is indeed looking only at the subjective side, at cognitive procedure; but the "compositions" in question are apt to follow similar rules as their analogue, the musical compositions. These are subjectively produced, but they work only where the subjective production is submerged in them. The subjectively created context- the "constellation"- becomes readable as sign of an objectivity: of the spiritual substance. pg. 165 38

In constellation, in reference to others we find the sharing of a lack; a communication of sorts; in the shared sympathy that suffering ought not to be. Thus we find the sign of an objectivity, of spiritual substance. This reference towards others has the form of a type of completion, where place is interpenetrated among the members, the universal place of sufferer. In the sharing of our lack, which is only contingent for Adorno, our lack is for the moment overcome. Language serves as the model for this communion, a co-mingling that cannot be arrived at in the immediate clutching of an identity thinking, but in the 'holding lightly’39 of self-reflection, when 'things in being are read as a text of their becoming'. It is a language in symbolic presentation, a 'chorus' of lack so to speak. Thinking becomes as a song.
It is here where we can show Negative Dialectics on the threshold of tragic sympathy as parallel to philosophy outside the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
We show here the parallel between Adorno's sense of suffering to sympathy in his existential imperative in combination with the model of the completion of lack- the constellation, and Paul Ricoeur's presentation of tragic reconciliation in the Symbolism of Evil.40 In determinate negation, of thinking rising to speech, there is a point of unity of the sympathy of suffering and suffering's tracing in the concept, and also the unity of the concepts reference to other concepts in constellation. Language, for Adorno, has its own sense of tragic reconciliation. In the Ricoeur of the Symbolism of Evil, tragic reconciliation occurs in the aesthetic transposition of terror and pity that constitutes the sympathy of suffering in constellation.41 It occurs in a communion, in an Interpenetration of members in the participation of suffering through sympathy. Tragic reconciliation has the form of a constellation that cleanses the cry that is human communication. This 'chorus' completes the individual lack that is the song of human communication, in a universal song of sympathy.

There remains the tragic spectacle itself, to purify whoever yields himself to the sublimity of the poetic word. It is neither counsel in the Apollonian sense, nor an alteration of personality in the Dionysian sense, except, perhaps, in a very remote sense- for example, in the sense that the spectacle fosters 'illusion'. Through the spectacle the ordinary man enters into the "chorus" which weeps and sings with the hero; the place of tragic reconciliation is the "chorus" and its lyricism. Ricoeur, pg. 231 42

The constellation in this sense is Adorno's moment of song of sympathy as model for the solitary subject. This is the moment that provides the 'more' of Adorno. This 'chorus' of the constellation for Adorno, is not a stasis condition for Adorno, but only a moment. In the arena of the objective world it is a moment that requires the objective participation of an other. This cannot be guaranteed for Adorno, no matter what Herculean effort by the single subject. We have only the chance of joining the 'chorus', the limited chorus of others in their song of sympathy. In fulfilling the subjects half of conditions necessary for reconcilement; in thinking--, and in bringing this to voice, to will, we have the possibility of joining the chorus.
Two conditions for Adorno block off reconcilement as permanence and as utopia, and also therefore as a static ideal. The first condition is possibility, the possibility arising in the horizon of the future and thus the negation of any kind of stasis. The second condition is the present conditions which would yet be changeable by human action43 -that others do not participate in the song of sympathy, but clutch in fear to immediate permanence-identity thinking. The common ground of this anti-utopian stance and a type of 'deliverance within the tragic’44 is found in Adorno as the negation of need in the moment of reconcilement. The negation of need in reconcilement is the survival of man, and is therefore the survival of need, the condition of human existence. The continuation of need is therefore the continuation of the tragic pose.
For Adorno we must not look to this reconcilement as an ideal, for this does nothing to bring about the reconcilement. The manner that will place us in a position for this reconcilement to occur, is total self-relinquishment in the particular, in the determinate negation of false identity, with the requirement of a sympathy that suffering ought not to be. It is why he says that for man to be a believer in god he must not believe.45 Reconcilement can become in the determinate negation of suffering that constitutes this no; so we can focus on the particular and reconcilement-God- to become in sympathy with the human side; in sympathy with suffering, in self-reflection on suffering, in the effort of a negative.

What thinking performs in it is a mimicry of the spell of things, of the spell from which it has endowed things, on the threshold of a sympathy that would make the spell disappear. pg. 270 46

Through this negation of need, need survives. This is the element that places Negative Dialectics in the position to be read as only on the threshold of sympathy in the form of the tragic.

Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking; it must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives. pg. 408 47

To hold something for Adorno is not a double-one handed affair, where to hold the object is to hold it away from the other in one hand, while pointing towards something else, or beating him, as adversary, with the other. Rather holding in an ordering but non-economic sense is holding in the manner of a holding of a note, a holding with two hands and the object open, as if in an offering. It is an active sharing in the effort that understands, that will relinquish its object. This is the 'holding lightly' that Adorno refers to. However until conditions change, for Adorno, the passage through a negative dialectics can facilitate the advancement towards the threshold of this sympathy, in resistance to the totalitarian nature of the status-quo. So this song of cannot sing affirmation,48 the conditions of a 'chorus', for Adorno have been suppressed. But the model for the 'chorus' is in language, and thus there is possibility. But while there is unneeded suffering in the world, and to those who clutch to the stasis of what is immediately given, Adorno's song sings in its internal resistance that suffering ought not to be. Adorno's song sings No!!


If indeed the earth alone among all the heavenly bodies were inhabited by rational beings, the idiocy of such a metaphysical phenomenon would amount to a denunciation of metaphysics; in the end, men would really be gods- and what gods!--only under a spell that prevents them from knowing it, and without dominion over the cosmos.- pg. 400


Notes
1 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics(New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1973).
2 Adorno, pg. 160.
3 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil(New York: Paul Ricoeur in arrangement with Harper & Row, 1967).
4 Adorno, pg. 12.
5 Adorno, pg. 45.
6 Adorno, pg. 270.
7 Adorno, pg. 45.
8 Adorno, pg. 102.
9 Adorno, pg. 25.
10 Adorno, pg. 52.
11 Adorno, pg. 160.
12 Adorno, pg. 374.
13 Adorno, pg. 202.
14 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment(New York: Hafner, 1972), pg. 138.
15 Adorno, pg. 45.
16 Kant, pg. 53-54.
17 Kant, pg. 155.
18 Adorno, pg. 25.
19 Kant, pg. 96.
20 Adorno, pg. 202.
21 Adorno, pg. 408.
22 Adorno, pg. 346.
23 Adorno, pg. 33.
24 Adorno, pg. 96.
25 Adorno, pg. 91.
26 Adorno, pg. 347.
27 Adorno, pg. 119.
28 Adorno, pg. 104.
29 Adorno, pg. 131.
30 Adorno, pg. 101.
31 Adorno, pg. 202.
32 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility(London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pgs. 26-27 & 202-203.
33 Kant, pg. 76.
34 Kant, pg. 135.
35 Kant, pg. 96.
36 Kant, pg. 96.
37 Kant, pg. 201.
38 Adorno, pg. 165.
39 Adorno, pg. 391-392.
40 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
41 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
42 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
43 Adorno, pg. 190.
44 Ricoeur, pg. 231.
45 Adorno, pg. 401-402.
46 Adorno, pg. 270.
47 Adorno, pg. 408.
48 Adorno, pg. 402.