Adorno

Adorno’s Years in California 287

But these texts always retained a special importance for him, even in
their first version of 1944. Unlike Horkheimer, he continued for the
whole of his life to remain committed to this book about the self-
contradictions of enlightenment, ‘the blackest book’ of critical theory.^77
Furthermore, in his eyes dialectic had become the critical method, which
by means of determinate negation turned the ‘Münchhausen trick of
pulling himself out of the bog by his own pig-tail into the pattern of all
knowledge’.^78 In addition, even if Adorno had not written the whole
work, it possessed the unmistakable marks of his style – the dialectical
reversals, the contrapuntally arranged clauses – that would become the
hallmark of his philosophy. Alongside the allegorical references, incant-
atory linguistic gestures and consciously chosen exaggerations, the book
contained hermetic formulations that were based on huge unspoken
assumptions. In fact, the idiosyncratic use of rhetoric,^79 that penetrating
linguistic power of the text in images, in the gestural use of language,
finds expression in the attempt to give philosophy a literary or aesthetic
inflection, while conforming to the rules of discursive logic.
Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their attempt at a demystifica-
tion of modern rationality as a way of achieving philosophical self-
clarification. But more than that, they carried out their radical critique
of reason against the background of an Enlightenment whose validity
is presupposed. This can be seen from the individual discussions
about what they had originally planned as a continuation of their work
together. Horkheimer emphasized the need to adhere to the radical
impulses of Marxism and the tradition of enlightenment. Like Adorno,
who demanded that ‘thought must be convicted of its deepest errors
through further thought’, Horkheimer believed that the reconstruction
of the history of reason was the only way to ‘rescue enlightenment’.^80
Adorno endorsed this programme wholeheartedly, but gave it a differ-
ent emphasis. Following Hegel, he wished to ‘define the negativity of
the negative’, because that was the only way to transcend the negativity
of the whole. The positive aspect of criticism, its reference point, would
then simply be ‘the experience of the difference’.^81 Evidently, Adorno
already had the outlines of a different book in mind when he entered
into these discussions. ‘We have to assert what a correct mode of thought
would look like, one that is appropriate to the philosophical state of
its age and has run through the entire gamut of criticism.’^82 He clearly
had an epistemological work in mind, but it was not one he would
write together with Horkheimer. Instead, he wrote it alone, more or
less precisely twenty years later. This, his magnum opus, did not appear
until 1966, when he was at the height of his intellectual powers. In the
Dialectic of Enlightenment, myth and reason appeared as two sides of
the same coin. In Negative Dialectics, the argument acquired its inner
tension from the antinomies of identity and non-identity. Until the book
was finished, Adorno had to undergo ‘much clattering of roll-top desks’
in which ‘questionnaires were being stored’.^83