126 Part II: A Change of Scene
a threefold semantics of aesthetics: as a term describing the realm of art
in its totality, as a personal attitude, and as a subjectively intended
mode of communication. He concludes that, against his own intentions,
Kierkegaard’s theory of the beautiful is idealist, that is, determined
entirely by subjectivity. Adorno, in contrast, insisted that works of art
are essentially temporal and particular in nature; they appear in ‘figurated
form’, not in the universal form of ideas.
Adorno briefly sets out his methodology. The distinction he draws
between literal meaning and metaphoric, philosophical content which is
laid bare by criticism corresponds to the relation of commentary and
criticism as expounded by Benjamin in his essay on Goethe’s Elective
Affinities. This notion of a two-stage interpretative process was strictly
text-based: it proceeds from the author’s writings, not his life. ‘The
person is only to be cited in the content of the work, a content that is
no more identical with the person than the person with the work.’^22
This principle holds good for Adorno’s epistemology as a whole. It
applies also to the chief criticism he levelled at Kierkegaard: that in
Kierkegaard’s work subjectivity has no weight of its own because it
is simply the stage on which the universal structures of existence are
enacted. Adorno pointed to the implication that Kierkegaard conceives
of inwardness as being entirely objectless since ‘the “I” is thrown back
onto itself by the superior power of otherness’. The world of objects
only supplies the subject with the mere occasion for the deed. Because
‘given objects’ are eliminated, ‘there is only an isolated subjectivity,
surrounded by a dark otherness.’^23
On the one hand, Adorno’s analysis focused on Kierkegaard’s failed
attempt to eliminate identity philosophy.^24 On the other hand, he was
attracted by the concept of dialectics, only to discover to his disappoint-
ment that Kierkegaard employs a concept of dialectics without objects,
and limits it to the movement of individual human consciousnesses
in opposites. His conclusion, one that constitutes a principal plank of
the book as a whole, is that ‘Kierkegaard did not “overcome” Hegel’s
system of identity; Hegel is inverted, interiorized.’^25 Kierkegaard like-
wise fails to understand ‘the irreversible and irreducible uniqueness
of the historical fact’,^26 particularly since he devalues history on the
grounds that it represents radical evil, a universal threat to inwardness.
Kierkegaard’s central concept of ‘situation’, defined as the decision taken
by a man thrown entirely on his own resources, could not constitute a
solution in Adorno’s eyes. On the contrary, the ‘situation’ is the reflec-
tion of the ‘reification of social life, the alienation of the individual from
a world that comes into focus as a mere commodity.’^27 These topoi,
reification and the commodity form, were to become permanent fea-
tures of Adorno’s theory of society.
Adorno’s settling of accounts with Kierkegaard focused on the
concept of the interior in which all objects would have no more than
symbolic value. The ‘interior’ is the symbol of the illusory nature of a