The final star in Adorno’s constellation is identified by Jay as “deconstruction-
ism.” While there is obviously no question of a direct exchange between Adorno’s
work and that of Derrida, Jay does discern a certain correspondence between
them.^44 It was Adorno’s intention to apply “immanent criticism” to Western meta-
physics, dismantling it from within with an extremely rigorous reading of the texts,
thus identifying its contradictions and false premises. This aim displays unmistakable
similarities with Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction.”
Marxism, modernism, mandarin conservatism, Jewish self-identification, and
a certain anticipation of deconstructionism—all these different poles are integrated
in Adorno’s work in a manner that makes it unique. Unlike Benjamin, who moved
back and forth between the different stars in his constellation and who did not always
succeed in mediating between them effectively (something that explains why the
interpretations of his work differ so sharply), Adorno’s writings possess a very high
degree of consistency, with few or no fundamental shifts in his philosophical as-
sumptions.^45 Some questions are more effectively stated in his later work—in that
respect “Auschwitz” is decisive; broadly speaking, however, there is a remarkable
consistency between the early texts and the later ones.
Consistency, however, by no means implies one-dimensionality. Adorno’s
work is in fact characterized by constant conflicts and paradoxes. His thought oscil-
lates between conflicting poles, and this has implications for his writings. His style is
deliberately nonsystematic and he is not afraid of paradoxes. This way of writing
should be seen in light of his view of reality, which he regards as being contradictory
at every point; thus, discourse about it must also be prepared to risk being contra-
dictory. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it: “Given the premise of an essentially antago-
nistic, contradictory reality, it is clear why Adorno felt that knowledge of the present
demanded the juxtaposition of contradictory concepts whose mutually negating ten-
sion could not be dissolved.”^46 The fact that his work is contradictory does not make
it gratuitous: although truth is never simple or without contradictions, one must not
assert just anything. The truth content of thought and writing remains a decisive fac-
tor, even if this criterion itself is ambivalent. With Adorno, truth always has a twofold
content: on the one hand it refers to the actual situation (the classical notion of truth
as adequatio rei et intellectus); on the other hand—and this is certainly no less im-
portant—“truth” refers to something that is always out of reach, to a utopian con-
tent. For Adorno “truth” corresponds not only to the world “as it is,” but also to the
world “as it might be.”
The whole of Adorno’s work testifies to his opposition to the dominance of a
mode of thinking that endorses the world “as it is,” to what he calls “identity think-
ing”: the thought that maps out reality by means of unambiguous concepts and
which in the act of cataloguing concrete and specific phenomena makes an abstrac-
tion of their particular character, thus standing in the way of any perspective that of-
fers something “other.” Like Benjamin, Adorno sees the “other” as concealed in the
concrete and the particular; it can be rendered visible only by an analysis that gives
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Architecture as Critique of Modernity