Messianic Redemption
Adorno stated at the end of his book Minima Moraliaof 1951, which he ded-
icated as a sign of gratitude and as a promise to his friend Horkheimer, and
which dealt with the damaged life people lived in globalizing late capitalist
society, that philosophy, as it alone could still be done responsibly in the face
of the universal despair, would be the attempt to consider all things in such
a way, as they represented themselves from the standpoint of Messianic
redemption: i.e., from the standpoint of the totally Other (Benjamin 1977;
Adorno 1980). Adorno was convinced that knowledge had no light other than
that which was shining from the redemption on the antagonistic world.
Everything else exhausted itself in reconstruction, and thus remained a piece
of positivistic technique. According to Adorno, perspectives would have to
be established, in which the world would transfer itself, and alienate and dis-
tance itself from itself, and would reveal its tears, antagonisms and abysses
in a similar way, as some day it shall lie prostrate and needy and distorted
in the Messianic light of Judgment Day and its perfect justice. Such per-
spectives had to be gained without arbitrariness and force: completely out
of being in touch micrologically with the natural and social objects them-
selves. For Adorno, that alone was what counted for genuine human think-
ing, and living, and acting.
The Messiah
According to Adorno, to establish such perspectives was, on the one hand,
a most simple procedure, because the condition of the antagonistic totality
of late civil society called for and demanded, irrefutably, such kind of knowl-
edge (Adorno 1980). Furthermore, the completed contradictoriness and neg-
ativity of late bourgeois society, once taken fully into view, shut together into
the mirror-script of its opposite: alternative Future III – the right, the free,
and reconciled society (Hegel 1986g; Adorno 1980). However, for Adorno,
the establishment of those perspectives was also the completely impossible,
because it presupposed a standpoint which was removed from the spell, the
magic circle, of existence: even if it was only a tiny little bit (Steinert 1989;
Schweppenhäuser 1996; Adorno 1980). The more passionately, so Adorno
argued, the thought sealed itself off from its being conditioned for the sake
of the Unconditional, the totally Other, the more unconsciously and thereby
the more fatefully it fell victim to the antagonistic world. The thought had
104 • Rudolf J. Siebert