Towards a Theory of Aesthetics 127society based on exchange, and is therefore unsuited as a principle with
which to oppose a history that has gone astray. He bolstered this criti-
cism by holding up to the light the sociological and mythical contents of
the interior. Under the heading of the ‘sociology of inwardness’, Adorno
disclosed the links between Kierkegaard’s written utterances and his
economic situation.
Adorno agreed with Kierkegaard’s rejection of idealist ontology
(Fichte’s I = I and Hegel’s subject/object), but refused to accept
the absolute value he placed on subjective existence in the name of
a transcendental meaning. What Adorno was unable to stomach was
Kierkegaard’s obsession with the individual human being: ‘The self, the
stronghold of all concretion, contracts in its singularity in such a fashion
that nothing more can be predicated of it: it reverses into the most
extreme abstractness; the claim that only the individual knows what the
individual is amounts to no more than a circumlocution for its final
unknowability.’^28
In conclusion, Adorno assembled once more a number of his inter-
pretative strategies in order to show that the realm of the aesthetic is
the genius loci of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. This becomes apparent
when Kierkegaard asserts that ‘the original experience of Christianity
remains bound to the image.’^29 Because all subsequent and prospective
images perish in the image of Christ, this process of decay proves to be
the salvaging of the aesthetic. ‘The hope that inheres in the aesthetic is
that of the transparency of decaying figures.’^30 In other words, the fall of
historical figures opens up the vista of a completely different history, if
only as a glimmer of hope. At this juncture, Adorno develops the idea
of reconciliation in art which even at this stage proves to be an essential
component of his aesthetic theory, and was destined to remain so. This
also holds good for the idea that hope arises from the fragmentary
ciphers washed up on the shores of history, ‘disappearing in front of
overflowing eyes, indeed confirmed in lamentation. In these tears of
despair the ciphers appear as incandescent figures, dialectically, as com-
passion, comfort and hope.’^31
Adorno followed Kierkegaard in the belief that truth exists only as
‘encipherment and disguise’ and is revealed ‘only through the disinteg-
ration of fundamental human relations’.^32 Fantasy, which according
to Adorno had to be ‘exact’,^33 is the organ enabling us to break free
from the catastrophic course of history and to become conscious of the
possibility of reconciliation. ‘The moments of fantasy are the festivals
of history.’^34 Finally, Adorno construed the doctrine of existence as
a negative philosophy of history that reverses that of idealism. He inter-
preted the direction taken by that reversal in the spirit of Walter
Benjamin: the entire course of history hitherto was that of a crime
against nature. Messianic hope will blossom when this catastrophic pro-
cess reaches its end. Hence reconciliation depends on the disintegration
of existing conditions.