Adorno

Thinking Against Oneself 487

task was not to avoid this problem but to accept it as something that

belonged to the essential legacy of Adorno’s critical theory and one of

his most productive ideas.^43 It is a legacy that arises from consistently

following critical theory through to its logical conclusion, in particular

the idea that it ‘must also be a thinking against itself’.^44

Dialectic, then, is conceived as immanent critique, as a method with

which to expose the internal contradictions in society and in thought

itself. Whether this key to his thought is sufficient to unlock all the

treasures it contains must remain an open question. The intention in

reconstructing Adorno’s life and work was not to provide a secret key

for treasure hunters, although it was hoped that it would stimulate their

curiosity. It would be rewarding, however, to hold fast to his visible

legacy^45 and to build on it: the critique of the coercion implicit in the act

of identification (Identifikationszwang) and of the restrictive concept

of rationality, the micrological method of interpretion of the analysis of

music and literature, the theory of the avant-garde and the criticism of

the media. Then there is the thread running through his writings of the

internal tension between negativity and messianism, between (a bad)

reality and (a better) possibility, between identity and non-identity,

ratio and mimesis, and especially between truth content and the desire

for expression that runs through the late writings. These extremes are

all characteristic of Adorno’s thinking. He wanted to be both an artist

and a scientist, a composer and a writer, a philosopher and a sociologist.

He had no ambition to be ‘a mediator between extremes’, in thought

any more than in his personality and his life. Instead, ‘mediation takes

place in and through the extremes, in the extremes themselves.’^46 In his

eyes a no man’s land was the symbol of the place where you can

be different without fear and where conflicts can be resolved without

having to take sides in advance.

Adorno_D01 487 10/5/05, 10:44 AM