Adorno

Thinking Against Oneself 481

Epilogue: Thinking Against Oneself

But it is evidently my fate to have to coax my entire production from my

life by a gradual process, and that may well be far from the worst way to

work. I could imagine that this is connected with another peculiarity that

I have observed in what I cobble together – that in truth every text of

mine is a kind of leave-taking.^1

Fifteen years before his death, Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann that

‘death was a human scandal’, that there was no cause ‘to celebrate it in

the name of tragedy’, and that it ‘should be abolished’.^2 The provocative

aspect of death and the aspect that unleashes resistance, Adorno once

remarked in a conversation with Ernst Bloch, lay in the utopian desire

to abolish it. All utopias were at heart a desire for eternal life, and

thus arise from the provocation of death. ‘Where the threshold of

death is not implied in the idea, there really is no utopia.’^3 This is why

utopia cannot be depicted; indeed, for its own sake we must not form

an image of it.

Adorno also devotes an entire section of Negative Dialectics, the

‘Meditations on Metaphysics’, to ‘Dying Today’. The solemn rituals

with whose assistance human beings do not so much commemorate the

dead as attempt to overcome their own impotence serve to resist the

existential experience of death. Adorno perceived the decisive reason

for repressing death as consisting in the fear of being robbed of one’s

own possessions. He registered this idea in an unpublished note in a

quite unmetaphysical style: ‘Banknotes can hardly be transferred to

hell, and it may be hoped that anyone who presents himself there as

a VIP will be greeted with the customary derision.... Of course, we

cannot know even that with certainty.... Even so, the metaphysics of

death nowadays includes the idea that death reminds men just how

frail the order is that they have erected so solidly on earth that they

imagine it is absolute.’^4 Associating with death is all the more intoler-

able for mankind, the more an autonomous, happy life is rendered

impossible by the social conditions of their lives. It follows that the

relation to death is not a constant but is preformed by society. Adorno

Adorno_D01 481 10/5/05, 10:44 AM