472 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
which was needed because only the great work of art is free from lies.
This redemption, however, must fail, or so Adorno argued in many
passages, if art, which is neither solace nor ecstasy, conforms, or even
adapts itself, to the taste of the recipient and thus enters into collusion
with the sphere of communication. Instead, art is the anticipatory mani-
festation (Vorschein) of something non-existent and thus the expression
of what might be possible objectively, in the realm of freedom. Art is
part of the world and yet its other. ‘Artworks have no truth without
determinate negation.’^114 This is the source of their irreconcilable
nature. Admittedly, all art is a fait social, part of the historical process,
but it is valid only as a strict repudiation of an antagonistic society. ‘Art
keeps itself alive only through its social force of resistance.. ..Its con-
tribution to it is not communication with it but. .. resistance... .Radical
modernity preserves art’s immanence by admitting society only in an
obscured form, as in dreams.’^115
An art that left social reality unscathed is nothing but commercial
art. Only those works of art that adopt an antithetical stance towards
society contain truth. This element of truth, however, can turn into its
opposite if works of art are themselves so successful that they suggest
the possibility of ‘reconciliation’ in our society. On its own art itself is
not in a position to sublate a world situation moving towards catastro-
phe. The ‘promise of happiness’ that arises from the utopian moments
of art is one that is always ‘broken’.^116 This applies even to the most
radical expression of art, such as Beckett’s anti-dramas, which are not
free of deception because, even though they may call for the abolition
of the bad, antagonistic side of reality whose absurdity is manifest, they
cannot achieve this themselves. ‘Artworks draw credit from a praxis
that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their
letters of credit.’^117
In so far as art has powers of resistance at its command, it shares with
philosophy the impulse to salvage the non-identical. While philosophy,
despite its utopian goal of cognition (‘striving by way of the concept
to transcend the concept’),^118 nevertheless continues to dwell in the
medium of concepts, art, as the sphere of the expressive, inhabits a non-
conceptual realm. For it makes use of mimetic means, rather than dis-
cursive ones. Adorno saw art as the site of a particular rationality, one
which neither appropriates objects for instrumental purposes nor tries
to ‘slay’ them analytically in a cognitive discourse, but one that can be
defined by empathy and imitation as a different form of cognition.^119 In
the Aesthetic Theory the term to which Adorno has recourse is that
of mimesis, or the mimetic faculty or impulse.
In the successful work of art mimesis and reason are not irrecon-
cilable opposites; on the contrary, art arises from these opposite poles.
‘Art is mimetic comportment that for the purpose of its objectivation
disposes over the most advanced rationality.’^120 However, this element
of rationality consists in the complete domination and shaping of the