362 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
late hymns, subjectivity is neither the absolute nor the ultimate. Sub-
jectivity commits a violation in setting itself up as absolute, when it is
in fact immanently compelled to self-positing.’^194 Adorno’s lecture cul-
minated in the recommendation to read Hölderlin’s poetry as an aspect
of de-mythologization because it protests against the myth of the ‘self-
deification of man’. With this, however, the poet has distanced himself
from classicism and identity philosophy: his poetics is one of non-
identity and non-conceptuality.
With this conclusion, Adorno had let the cat out of the bag, since
a philosophy of non-identity was to become his principal concern during
the coming years, and it had already been a topic frequently mentioned
in his letters. His demonstration of the paratactical structure of
Hölderlin’s poetry was also the attempt to put his own cards on the
table without revealing the secret of his game. For Adorno Hölderlin’s
treatment of language was as important as the affinity he detected
between his view of the world and those of Kafka and Beckett. This
explains why he regarded the essays on these writers as key texts.
He made this clear to Jürgen Habermas in a letter of July 1963. He
approached Habermas having heard that Habermas intended to write
an essay for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that would appear on
11 September 1963, Adorno’s sixtieth birthday.^195 Habermas utterly failed
to take the hint, and focused instead on a different text in his apprecia-
tion, which turned out to be one of the most penetrating contributions
to be written at that time. The essay he chose bore the succinct title
‘Progress’, a talk that Adorno had given on 22 October 1962 at the
Philosophers’ Conference in Münster. Habermas instantly grasped the
meaning of the situation in which Adorno, the outsider, addressed
the assembled guild of philosophers: ‘A writer among bureaucrats’.^196
Adorno’s shrewd reflections on the concept of progress were a master-
piece of the essay form that he himself had discussed elsewhere. He had
emphasized there that in the essay what counted was not just the way in
which ideas were expressed, but that they should transform their object
into a ‘force field’ and ‘move in so close to the hic et nunc of the object
that the object becomes dissociated into the moments in which it has
its life.’^197
The theme of his lecture was his analysis of progress in contemporary
society from the standpoint of the philosophy of history. Adorno took
up an older idea that he had referred to in a letter to Horkheimer of
February 1957. There he had pointed to the anachronistic element in
the idea of improving the world. ‘The measure of what is yearned for
is always to a certain degree happiness that has been lost thanks to the
progress of history. Whoever finds himself up with events and in tune
with his age is always entirely in conformity with it and does not wish
things to be otherwise.’^198 Horkheimer agreed with what Adorno had
termed his ‘little idea’ and emphasized for his part the irrational form
in which progress currently took place. ‘However advanced we are