even still to comprehend its own impossibility for the sake of its possibility.
In relation to the demand, which was thereby directed toward thought, the
question concerning the reality or the unreality of the Messianic redemption,
the appearance or non-appearance of the Messiah, was itself almost a mat-
ter of indifference: almost, not completely (Adorno 1980; Benjamin 1977).
Once, for the old Jews, every second in time had been the small gate, through
which the Messiah could enter (Benjamin 1977; Adorno 1980:333–334). The
Messiah would interrupt the sameness and the identity pressure of the hor-
rible historical continuum of force and counterforce, crime and punishment,
guilt and atonement, reformation and counterreformation, revolution and
counterrevolution. The Messiah would break the law of the talion: the law
of retaliation. The Jewish mystics already thought that men had to do the
work of redemption all by themselves. If the Messiah would still come, he
would only have to put his signature underneath it.
Remembrance
The secular enlighteners went further and thought that, if the Messiah would
not have to do more than merely putting his signature underneath the redemp-
tive work done already by men, then they may very well do the whole thing
without the Messiah. But then there occurred the dialectic of enlightenment,
and the moral catastrophe of fascist anti-Semitism, and the fraud of mass cul-
ture in civil society, as described most ingeniously by Horkheimer and Adorno:
the more rationalization, the more irrationality, and the more integration the
more disintegration (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969; Benjamin 1978). Enlighten-
ment came to its antinomistic limits. The dialectic of enlightenment still con-
tinues in late capitalist society today in 2006. In any case, the longing and
the hope for the radically non-identical Other, which drove the thought and
praxis of the critical theorists as enlighteners under and against the identity
principle of uncivil civil society throughout the 20th century, tolerated no
reification of its Otherness and thus no forgetfulness. Certainly, the critical
theorists agreed with Baal Shem Tov’s motto, that “Forgetfulness leads to
exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption” (Adorno 1980). The
Kabbalists had the most logical solution to the theodicy problem: the infinite
God could not double himself up. He could not create another Infinite. He
could only create a finite world, which is more and more in desperate need
of re-membrance and redemption (Adorno 1997a; 1997c; 1980; Benjamin 1977).
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 105