already lost, defensive position of theology and metaphysics, or whether the-
ology and metaphysics survived only in the meanest and shabbiest refuse of
the phenomenal world, the so finite and transitory ciphers; whether a state
of consummate insignificance will let it restore reason to the autocratic human
reason that performed its office without resistance or reflection (Adorno
2003:402–405; Habermas 1988:278–279). In Adorno’s view, theology and meta-
physics could possibly survive in the micrology of the smallest, shabbiest,
meanest detail or cipher of reality. While this micrology is certainly far removed
from any post-ontological proof for the existence of God, it is, nevertheless,
almost a Judeo-Christian idea: to see the resemblance of the entirely Other
in the oppressed, exploited, tortured, hanged, shot, gassed, crucified, hope-
less innocent victims of, what the otherwise optimistic Hegel and his oppo-
nent, the father of metaphysical pessimism, Schopenhauer, had identified as,
the slaughterbench, or the holocaust altar of world-history (Hegel 1986k;
1986n; Adorno 2003:402–405; Oelmüller 1990; Neuhaus 1993; Schuster &
Boschert-Kimmig 1993; Metz 1995; Greinacher 1986; Sölle 1989). Hegel had
also spoken of the little flowers, or the foul existences, on which the power-
ful were stepping all the time (Hegel 1986k). While Hegel took suffering into
the dialectical notion, for the critical theorists, the extreme suffering of the
20th century exploded and shattered the dialectical notion altogether: the
result was the negative dialectics (Hegel 1986f; 1986n; Adorno 2003). While
Adorno stressed the non-identity between even the highest notion and the
smallest existence, micrology could at least still discover a semblance of the
former in the latter (Adorno 1973:402–405). Such semblance of the totally
Other in the smallest existential detail of nature, personal biography, family,
civil society, political state and history is not entirely without consolation.
Motivated by their longing for the entirely Other, or as Fromm put it, by the
X-experience of a humanistic religiosity, the critical theorists did not only
allow semantic and semiotic materials and potentialities to migrate from
Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and other world religions into the modern
bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, but they also
made the attempt to rescue them from positivism and fascism, and thus to
renew the barbarously threatened spirit of the West (Fromm 1992; 1981; 2001;
1990; 1970b; 1970a; 1999; 1980; 1969; Habermas 2002; Mendieta 2005). That,
precisely, they considered to be their mission.
70 • Rudolf J. Siebert