of the commodity character in the Hegelian self-consciousness the explosion
and blasting of the phantasmagoria.
The Restitution of Theology
Here Adorno tried to sum up in a daring grasp the bow of his critique so far
carried out in his Hornberg letter (Benjamin 1978, 1983; Lonitz 1994). According
to Adorno, this grasp had to close itself around the extremes of the bow: the-
ology on one hand and historical materialism on the other (Benjamin 1978,
1977). For Adorno, as well as for Benjamin, that could not be otherwise.
According to Adorno, a restitution of theology, or better still a radicalization
of the dialectic into the theological glowing fire, would at the same time have
to be an extreme sharpening of the social-dialectical, and even the econom-
ical motive. In Adorno’s view, the theology to be restituted was the other
one, which he shared with Benjamin: the negative, inverse, cipher or sem-
blance theology. In his Passage Work, Benjamin had compared this inverse
theology, which he shared with Adorno, with something so profane as a blot-
ting paper (Benjamin 1985; Lonitz 1994). Later on, in his Minima Moralia,
Adorno would compare the inverse cipher theology with a mirror (Adorno
1980). According to Adorno, the fully developed negativity or contradictori-
ness of civil society, once taken completely into view, would shoot together
into the mirror-script of its very opposite: alternative Future III – the redeemed
society (Hegel 1986g; Adorno 1980). Sometimes, Adorno and Benjamin com-
pared their inverse cipher theology with a jacket, which was to be turned
inside out (Adorno 1970a). According to Adorno and Benjamin, theology was
to be rescued, if at all, not as Gerhard Scholem, or Siegfried Kracauer, or Karl
Barth, or Paul Tillich, or Theodor Haecker, or other philosophers, theologians
or social scientists wanted to do it, namely in linear and romantic and posi-
tive terms, but rather dialectically, in the form of their negative as well as
inverse theology of the totally Other, the entirely Non-Identical, the absolutely
New, which theology would contain in itself historical materialism as its polit-
ical instrument (Horkheimer 1985a; Lonitz 1994; Benjamin 1977; Horkheimer
1988a; Kracauer 1995).
D. Anti-Fascism
In the early 1940s, Adorno concentrated some of his social research on the
psychological technique of the Protestant minister and clerico-fascist Martin
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 87