146 Part II: A Change of Scene
truth is available only through conscious reflection, or, in Kantian terms,
only through transcendental reflection on the a priori conditions of the
understanding. Benjamin argues against this Kantian idea by insisting
that in principle the truth is capable of being represented in language.
The argument has two main points. Since truth expresses ‘an intentionless
state of being, made up of ideas’, it is beyond the subject, and hence
beyond its control. This is the theological side of Benjamin, since he
positions the truth in analogy to revelation. Truth is not representable
in toto. It appears as representation, never as the object of representa-
tion. Hence truth is never the product of scientific deduction or of
induction from empirical findings. It results solely from a ‘constellation’.
It is not the phenomena that contain the ideas, but only their significant
relation to one another. The constellation has three aspects: the rep-
resentation of ideas as an intentionless state of being, the redeeming
of phenomena by ‘grouping them together conceptually’ according
to ‘what they have in common’, and, finally, the preservation of the
‘distinct and the disparate’ by means of a ‘microscopic process’. Accord-
ing to Benjamin, a truth content can only be grasped through the most
precise immersion in the detail of a thing. The philosophical intention
of the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ amounts to a project of philoso-
phical reconciliation that is opposed to an idealist notion of intuiting
‘connections between essences’.^53 Adorno had made Benjamin’s idea of
defining truth as an intentionless state of being his own – at least since
the inaugural lecture. As his philosophy developed, he worked to clarify
this antagonism to both the philosophy of consciousness and empiricism
and to elaborate it as a theory of unreduced experience.^54
In his desire to develop a conception of truth that would serve as a
corrective to idealist philosophy, he proposed to centre the idea of know-
ledge in the meaning of an object in its specificity. Instead of starting
from the knowing subject and the categories of the understanding,
Adorno wished to give priority to the object (repudiating the idealist
priority of the subject). In the constitution of experience, the object of
experience is granted a kind of right to resist the ascription of the
intended categories of consciousness. The only way forward for the
knowledge of an intentionless state of being is to achieve an insight into
the limits of knowledge, i.e., the process of acquiring knowledge through
self-reflection on a meta-level, what Adorno in his major philosophical
work will later call thinking against oneself.^55
The main section of the book on tragedy provides the example with
which to test the truth theory of the Prologue. For Benjamin the tragic
drama (Trauerspiel) is a baroque allegory. This allegory encodes the
disintegration of the medieval world order, a collapse of which people
had become conscious. What is expressed in the allegory of the tragic
drama is the melancholy provoked by the decay of the order of divine
meaning, and especially by its fragmentation, the disintegration of the
world order. Corresponding to the allegory of mourning, of the decay of