187if it is rightly applied—”right” not in political but in disciplinary, artistic-autonomous
terms—vouches for its critical character, even apart from the personal intention of
the artist. Works of art yield a kind of knowledge of reality. This knowledge is critical
because the mimetical moment is capable of highlighting aspects of reality that were
not perceivable before. Through mimesis, art establishes a critical relation with so-
cial reality.
Because art in Adorno’s view plays the role of an oppositional activity, Michael
Cahn calls his concept of mimesis “subversive”: “According to Adorno, art must
differ from the social in order to remain art. At the same time, however, it must be
similar to its opposite in order to be possible as critique, since only the mutual
involvement of critique and its object avoids the Hegelian double-bind in which two
conflicting statements oppose each other unresolvably.”^74 In order to carry out a gen-
uine critique, it is necessary for works of art to identify to a certain extent with what
they are in revolt against. This notion can be seen, for instance, in a passage in which
Adorno states that works of art are in a certain sense allied to the death principle. Be-
cause they remove that which they objectify from the immediacy of life, they submit
by way of mimesis to reification, which, as a social realization of instrumental
thought, nevertheless constitutes their own death principle. It is precisely here that
Adorno sees the precondition for genuine critique: “Without the admixture of poi-
son, virtually the negation of life, the opposition of art to civilizatory repression would
amount to nothing more than impotent comfort.”^75 In order not to fall back into use-
less consolation, in order to serve as genuine critique, art is obliged to enter into a re-
lation of similarity with reality, against which it levels its criticism. Art must become
“Mimesis an ihr Widerspiel” (mimesis of its opposite): “Art was compelled to this by
its social reality. Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a
position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through identification with that against
which it remonstrates.”^76
This is also why Adorno states that works of art can exercise a critique of the
dominant thought only inasmuch as they at least in part have made this dominant
thought their own: “The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domi-
nation. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order
to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination.”^77 Cahn
compares the strategy that Adorno describes with the medical principle of inocula-
tion: in order to give the patient immunity to a certain sickness, he is infected with it,
but in a controlled manner. In the same way art should be “infected” with the reifi-
cation that it in fact opposes. The control organ that according to Adorno is employed
in art (to round out Cahn’s metaphor) is reason: art is not simply mimesis; through
reason it becomes a controlled form of mimesis. It is precisely this interplay between
mimesis and reason that puts art in a position where it is able to exercise criticism.
The mimetic impulse, according to Adorno, has to do with a gesture of nega-
tion: the work of art does not produce a positive image of reality or a positive image
of what a utopian, ideal reality might be. On the contrary, the image it produces is a186