According to Adorno, at the same time Benjamin was to represent and expose
the notion of the dialectical image in full lucidity. Nobody knew better than
Adorno that every sentence in Benjamin’s Passagen Werkhad to be loaded
with political dynamite. But, so Adorno argued, the deeper the dynamite was
carried into the depths, the more it would tear and sweep things away. Adorno
wanted to act as advocate for Benjamin’s own intentions against a tyranny,
which had only to be called by its name in order to disappear: the despotism
of Brecht’s all too abstract Marxist atheism. Of course, the prima philosophia –
i.e., concern with the first things – suggested by Adorno, was rather an ultima
philosophia, i.e., concern with the last things – or an eschatological theodicy,
which aimed in theory and praxis at the end of the Hegelian, as well as of
the Brechtian, and any other form of positivism: ultimately at the end of the
hellish slaughterbench, Golgatha, and holocaust altar of nature and world-
history: Shalom – It shall be well! (Adorno 1997e).
Hell and The Golden Age
Adorno referred back to the language of Benjamin’s glorious first design of
the Arcade Work, which had still been very theological (Benjamin 1978, 1983).
Here Benjamin had stated, that if the dialectical image was nothing else than
the mode of conception of the fetish character of the commodity in the col-
lective consciousness of civil society, then admittedly the Saint-Zionistic con-
ception of the world of commodities as utopia may reveal itself, but not its
reverse side, namely, the dialectical image of the bourgeois society of the 19th
century as hell (Benjamin 1978, 1977). However, in Adorno’s view, only this
dialectical image of modern capitalist society as hell would be able to put
the dialectical image of the Golden Age into the right place and position.
Thus, to Adorno, Benjamin’s liquidation of the task of the category of hell in
his new design of the Arcades Project and particularly of the ingenious quo-
tation concerning the gambler, seemed not only a loss of splendor, but also
of dialectical correctness. Adorno did not want to deny at all the relevance
of the immanence of consciousness for the bourgeois society of the 19th cen-
tury. But, according to Adorno, out of this immanence of consciousness could
not be gained the notion of the dialectical image. It was rather so, that the
immanence of consciousness was itself, as interior, the dialectical image for
the civil society of the 19th century, as alienation. Here Adorno had to insist
on the continuing validity of the second chapter of his book on Kierkegaard
(Adorno 1997c; Benjamin 1978). According to Adorno’s book, the dialectical
84 • Rudolf J. Siebert