"Not Yet" Adorno and The Utopia of Conscience

"Not Yet": Adorno and the Utopia of Conscience
Author(s): Max Blechman

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 70 (Fall, 2008), pp. 177-198
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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"NOT YET"
ADORNO AND THE UTOPIA OF CONSCIENCE
Max Blechman
Only the critical idea that unleashes the force stored up in its own object is fruitful;
fruitful both for the object, by helping it to come into its own, and against it,
reminding it that it is not yet itself.
?T. W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies
That the subjective conscience will "with good reason" consider objective morality
most hostile to itself?this word of Hegel's looks like a philosophical slip of the pen.
?T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
So it seems necessary at this point to let Kant burn through Hegel: the self must
remain in everything; though it may at first exteriorize itself everywhere, move
reverberantly through everything in order to break the world open, in order above
all to pass through a thousand doorways, but precisely the self that desires and
demands, the not yet implanted postulated world of its a priori is the system's
finest fruit and sole purpose, and therefore Kant ultimately stands above Hegel as
surely as psyche above pneuma, Self above Pan, ethics above Encyclopedia, and
the moral nominalism of the End above the still half cosmological realism of Hegel's
world-idea.
?Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
A
flmong the various intellectual gymnastics and surgical oper
ations proposed in the critical reception of Hegel, from "turning Hegel
off his head" (Marx and EngelsfQl}) to "separating the living from the
dead" (CrocefQl}), the strategy suggested by Bloch in The Spirit of
Utopia, "to let Kant burn through Hegel," might best serve to high
light what is at stake in the project of negative dialectics. Indeed,
Adorno may be interpreted as taking this strategy over for himself
when, in an essay from 1965, he states: "The book, Bloch's first, bear
ing all his later work within it, seemed to me to be one prolonged re
bellion against the renunciation within thought that extends even into
Cultural Critique 70?Fall 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota
178 | MAX BLECHMAN
its purely formal character. ... I do not believe I have ever written
anything without reference to it, either implicit or explicit."1
A Blochian motif that equally structures Adorno's writings, it
acts as an ongoing reprise or, better still, as the "temporal organizing
principle"2 of his philosophical criticism. But the whole movement?
beyond the spirit of "prolonged rebellion," beyond the imperative re
sistance to a false reconciliation in relation to which the Hegelian sys
tem is ultimately judged guilty?itself represents a retrieval of the
fundamental in Hegel's philosophy. Dialectics is true to itself only
insofar as it does justice to the "not yet" of human reconciliation, inas
much as it keeps in view, as Hegel himself had insisted, the "tarrying
with the negative" that alone brings spirit towards "an achieved com
munity of minds."3
This core Hegelian insight, hermetically outlined in the preface
of Phenomenology, is taken up by Adorno as the "system's finest fruit
and sole purpose," to borrow Bloch's phrase. Yet this Hegelian pur
pose, even as it transforms the transcendental basis of the practical in
Kant, expresses in Bloch and Adorno a Kantian qualification of Hegel.
Letting Kant burn through Hegel while acknowledging that "Kant can
not be done without Hegel,"4 maintaining that "the debate between
Kant and Hegel, in which Hegel's devastating argument had the last
word, is not over"5?these formulations rest on a complex exchange:
1) Against the limits set by Kant, the abstractions of formalism, and with
the experiential, the at once historical and substantial core of Hegelian
dialectics that marks the starting-point of speculation. "It is absurd to
prevent the subject's internal cognition of the very thing it dwells in, of
the thing in which it has far too much of its own interior."6
2) Against the Hegelian closure, the mapping of the system onto
objective reality, and with the transcendental Maximum, the normative
ideal of Kantian practice that unveils the disparity between the rational
and the real. "The ray of light that reveals the whole to be untrue in all
its moments is none other than Utopia, the utopia of the whole truth,
which is still to be realized."7
The reciprocal movement carried in the motif, from Kant to Hegel and
from Hegel to Kant, moving "forward and backward at the same time"8
like the thematic articulations of Beethoven's music, reconfigures the
necessary standpoint of speculation against the teleological assurance
of rational totality. In both Bloch and Adorno, the dialectical Kant/
"NOT YET" | 179
Hegel mechanism structures a permanent melancholic dissonance from

within harmonic expectation. It is as if the triumphant optimism of
the Eroica, the dream-fulfillment of the Grand Symphony, were medi
ated by the harsh counterpoints of a Stravinsky score, written for a
"sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble ... its convulsive dream
like compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth."9
At stake, in short, is thinking our way through the double bind first
formulated by Bloch in the Spirit of Utopia. On the one hand, Hegel
offers a salient critique of moral individualism and the empty protes
tations of the beautiful soul. That is, he "understands the mediated
thought that secures against every kind of avoidance or Don Quixote,
against a false, disengaged, unreal radicalism."10 On the other, this
mediation of the real, itself transformed into an absolute, threatens
to become as irrational as the partiality it only purportedly over
comes. "One searches in vain in Hegel for that sensibility which alone
directs us upward and is aware of the danger, which manifests itself
in Kant . . . that there must be, beyond the mere repetition of what
is or was, a knowledge grounding the deed, or a vision of that world
that is not but which shall be, which drives us to act."11 Adorno states
matters this way: "Through his critique of Kant, Hegel achieved a
magnificent extension of the practice of critical philosophy beyond the
formal sphere; at the same time, in doing so he evaded the supreme
critical moment, the critique of totality, of something infinite and con
clusively given."12
The Kant-through-Hegel motif may be specified further: in Hegel,
subjective spirit has "defected overzealously to the objective one."13
Hegel undermines his own science of the experience of consciousness
by heedlessly dismissing "as an unreconciled evil" the contesting, in
dividual experience of objective universality, and thus lends himself
"to the role of defending power from an allegedly higher vantage
point."14 Hegel immersed himself in the material, in concrete partic
ularity, only in the last analysis to subsume it to the "self-surveying
whole," the self-returning generality of "higher truth."15 As such, the
passage from subjective to objective idealism is won at the cost of a
"tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which
constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing con
cepts, but also its inhumanity."16 Or again, the Hegelian survey steeps
the Idea in the particular only "to reduce it to a through-station, and
180 | MAX BLECHMAN
finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death for the
sake of a reconciliation occurring merely in reflection."17
It is a winding pathway that Adorno opens through Kant and Hegel.
For he seeks to maintain with Hegel, and against the self-sufficient
autonomy of Kantian practical reason, a dialectically grounded cri
tique of the particular. "The false consciousness of isolated things as
being themselves alone and not moments of the whole" will inevitably
"break down with the power of the whole."18 Yet with Kantian auton
omy, and against the Hegelian rationalization of objectification, Adorno
wishes simultaneously to maintain a space for an objectivity whose
reality would have to "measure up to the subject's criticism," that is,
a space for "the continuing irreconcilability of subject and object, which
constitutes the theme of dialectical criticism."19
Put differently, the standpoint of totality must be adopted in order
to counteract the delusion of the particular; but without a ground for
the rational independence of the particular, it becomes increasingly
difficult to point to how, in principle, a rational self-consciousness of
the social is to be differentiated from conformity to the delusions of
an irrational totality. Adorno suggests that the standpoint of genuine
totality can be achieved only negatively, as "antagonistic totality,"20
by attending dialectically to the real tensions of the social. But again,
the question remains as to how these tensions may be evaluated crit
ically if the independent, moral voice of criticism is held to be subjec
tive vanity. Indeed, if it is granted that "morality, autonomy founded
on pure self-certainty, together with conscience, is mere illusion,"21
then we risk having the pretense to an independence of the particular
dispelled only by a whole itself caught in the spell of existing social
ity?that of the "insuperable inertia of facts."22
By specifying the problem in this way, we come up against the
contentious knot of the Kant-through-Hegel motif, that is, conscience,
the moral self-certainty charged by Hegel with ambiguity and self
deception. The Phenomenology's suggestion that there is no indepen
dent moral reality is not only a keystone for the self-understanding of
concrete ethical life. It is above all "the recognition that the moral can
by no means be taken for granted, that conscience does not guaran
tee right action, and that pure immersion of the self in the question of
what to do and what not to do entangle one in contradiction and futil
ity."23 In Adorno's view, the Phenomenology pulls the carpet from under
"NOT YET" | 181
the Kantian autonomous subject by linking the inextinguishable ques

tion of the good life "through its own content to the production of a
true totality?to precisely what appears under the name of humanity
in the Critique of Practical Reason/'24 In other words, the primacy of the
individual/universal model, the transcendental matrix of moral imme
diacy and infinite duty, is overturned in favor of attending to the con
crete production of ethical sociality. And it is overturned in such a
way that the abstract, architectonic skeleton of humanity, emancipa
tion's indelible idea, is temporalized into the real relations that make
up its flesh and blood.
Yet with the emphasis on the social mediation of the rational and
its historical production?with the displacement of the factum of con
science by the world-idea?negativity, the disparity between the con
ditioned and the unconditioned, goes by the board. The concrete
experience from which Hegel drew is distorted in the dialectic that
claims to disclose the whole with the particular. Adorno's counter
attack against the Hegelian firm grasp of the whole?his specification,
in opposition to Hegel, that the whole is negative, expressive of the
ongoing irreconcilability between subject and object?coheres with
his exigency that philosophy satisfy "the postulate of determinate
negation, which is a positing."25 That is to say, the morally necessary
negation that brings the untruth of existing totality to the light of day
that reveals the whole as not yet what it should be, itself implies a crit
ical knowledge of the whole?a knowledge that rests on an inkling of
the whole that is yet to he. It is not simply that "consummate negativ
ity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite."26
Rather, the very facing up to negativity underscores the consciousness
of its opposite as the idea in light of which the untruth of the whole
appears in its saliency.
In this way, we return to the double bind that forms the guiding
thread of our enquiry. The untruth of conscience consists in its pre
supposed removal from the real, in the moral cognition that would,
as it were, be heterogeneous to the objective sociality to which it is
inextricably bound. Yet genuine, critical insight into the untruth of
objective sociality requires an independence of moral thought at the
heart of the real, that is, it requires some form of the inner/outer
opposition that Kant had brought to a fever pitch with the notion of
conscience. This is, however, "the utterly impossible thing, because it
182 | MAX BLECHMAN
presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth,

from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible
knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold
good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion
and indigence which it seeks to escape."27
In light of this aporia, the double-edged method of the Phenome
nology?that phenomena would be allowed to appear in a pure "look
ing on," while being reflectively returned to the authentic substance
of the subject?rings false. The extraordinary assumption of this return
to self is expressed succinctly in the Hegelian equation: "the Sub
stance of the individual, the World-Spirit itself."28 Observation is to
provide the content of interpretation, following the formula that the
essential truth-content of moral thought is coextensive with the his
torical self-disclosure of the social world. Evidently, if the Adornian
critique of Hegel's version of morality in thought is itself informed
historically, it is precisely in the form of a melancholic objection to the
possibility of holding such self-reconciling reality in view: "but how
much more difficult has it become to conform to such morality now
that it is no longer possible to convince oneself of the identity of sub
ject and object, the ultimate assumption of which still enabled Hegel to
conceal the antagonistic demands of observation and interpretation."29
Yet when we consider Adorno's qualified retrieval of the Hegelian
model?that the morality of thought "should be at every moment both
within things and outside them"30?we are thrown back to the aporia
all over again. How are we to understand this moral consciousness,
this simultaneity of historical inscription and transcendence? How are
we to grasp a morality of thought that lies "in a procedure that is nei
ther entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor empty"31?a proce
dure, we may add, that is neither strictly Hegelian nor recognizably
Kantian?
A unique site is available for examining the tensions of this paradox

ical operation. If we turn back to Bloch, we may put matters this way:
"the real is posited as the Utopian, the Utopian as the real?the Ought
and the Valid have paid the greater price for the Spirit's regrettable
worldliness, its world-reality."32 With greater nuance, we find in Adorno
the same accusation of loss, an equal need for qualification: "the real
can be considered rational only insofar as the idea of freedom, that is,
"NOT YET" | 183
human beings' genuine self-determination, shines through it."33 The

rehabilitation, in the mind's comprehension of the real, of a histori
cally heterogeneous utopia?the not yet of the rational in the real?
returns volens nolens to the originary stage of this aporetic tension.
In the Second Division of the Transcendental Logic, Kant construes
the apparent contradiction as follows: "our reason naturally raises itself
to cognitions far too elevated to admit of the possibility of an object
given by experience corresponding to them?cognitions which are
nevertheless real, and are not mere phantoms of the brain."34 In brief,
the historically real contradicts the Utopian, yet the Utopian?the max
imum inscribed in the idea of reason?is epistemically real, and in this
precise sense, it cannot be alien to the historical and experiential realms
of individual and social existence. What makes the Utopian appear
unreal is the coercive monopoly of dominant reality over appearance,
which is not to be confused with the whole of the real itself. The sub
stance of Kant's "far too elevated" cognitions is a reality that is in the
form of human potentiality. In Adorno's cryptic terms, "utopia is
blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality; this is why it
seems abstract in the midst of extant things."35 In other words, it is the
socially deformed possibility for Utopia's realization in history, and
nothing inherent to the relation itself, that deepens the chasm between
the historical and the Utopian while endowing the latter with the tenor
of an abstraction, with a likeness to "mere phantoms of the brain."36
The question, however, is not to think within the limits placed on
the Kantian transcendental idea, as if morality in thought were to con
sist in ascending to the principles of the unconditioned. Rather, criti
cal theory redirects its gaze, from within extant objectivity, to the as
yet unmonopolized, it "sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured."37 It
takes its cue from a whole that is not yet, but that may be delineated,
negatively, in instances of a still incomplete presence. This implies a
double movement, the maintaining of a tension in the mind:
1) Human reason is retrieved in its speculative aspect, that is, in its tie
to the Utopian idea of a fulfilled human sociality. "Reason as the tran
scendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence
in which human beings organize themselves to form the universal sub
ject and resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the
conscious solidarity of the whole. The whole represents the idea of true
universality, Utopia."38
184 | MAX BLECHMAN
2) Simultaneously, the materialist immersion in the historically real

is emphasized, while the Hegelian confidence in a truth that would his
torically prevail is inverted. "Critical thought, which does not call a halt
before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants
of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem
powerless before the great historical trend."39
The duality of consciousness?as historically immanent and tran

scendent, as both caught in a material dependence on the present stage
of society and tied inalienably to the truth-content of a Utopian be
yond?is extrapolated and elucidated to form the structural tension
of critical theory's methodology. The result is a speculative material
ism,40 a negative phenomenology that redefines the very meaning of
the rational idea: "'A' is to be what it is not yet. Such hope is contradic
torily tied to the breaks in the form of predicative identity. Philosoph
ical tradition had a world for these breaks: 'ideas.' They are neither
X(ogtg nor an empty sound; they are negative signs."41
By redefining the idea in this way, Adorno sets morality in thought
as that which qualifies both the architectonic identity of practical rea
son (Kant) and the self-reconciling identity of being with its notion
(Hegel). According to this materialism, the idea qua "negative sign"
expresses an implication inscribed in the empirical person, "the sous
entendu that something impossible is ascribed to him because it shows
in him."42 The Adornian redefinition of the rational idea hinges on
this negativity of the sign, on the understanding of this "showing" as
a human ascription confronted by concrete, historical contradiction.
Indeed, it is precisely in the form of nonidentity that the identity of
the idea is made palpable to thought and accessed in its truth. As it
were, likeness shows itself through unlikeness, the presence of the
idea's content is experienced negatively, as the pang of its absence.
The paradox of the idea is that it is only a "given" in the form of an
index to a condition in need of being "taken," yet any positive "tak
ing" of what is represented under the idea threatens permanently to
belie its truth-content. For the idea is the universal identity, the impos
sible content to which, as concept, it nonetheless demands to be ap
plied. Thus, the application of the idea to empirical being signifies
ineluctably a "lagging behind" of the concept, in that any act of appli
cation is simultaneously the indexing of a discrepancy, the unfolding
of a sign that betrays the concept as never being what it says it is.43
"NOT YET" | 185
Because the concept is only a concept insofar at it is equated with what

it means to cover, the concept qua form expresses a confrontation with
its own meaning as content. In a word, the duality of the idea as tran
scendence and immanence is caught a priori in the experience of its
ongoing historical contradiction.
Likewise, the truth of the particular, of the individual, of the
subject-content covered under the concept, is to be "both more and less
than his general definition."44 The individual is "more" than his con
cept insofar as the concept as form (the Utopian universal) feigns to
cover an achieved content?a state of affairs that the individual can
experience only negatively, as his own "not yet." The "lagging behind"
of the concept is the deformity of the idea in its merely operational
application as A=A. In other words, the operational concept lags behind
in relation to the concept known experientially by the individual in
the form of a lack, of a "not yet." And the "more" of the individual in
relation to the operational concept is the "more" of this lack, the "more"
of the 'A is to he what it is not yet?the "more" of the idea inscribed in
the individual as his own negativity
Which is another way of saying that the individual is "less" than his
general definition, "less" than his idea, inasmuch as the truth-content
of the idea itself points to a "lagging behind" of the individual in rela
tion to himself, inasmuch as it underscores his own damaged condi
tion. The "less" of the individual is his discrepancy as particular-subject
in relation to his idea-form?or, better still, his discrepancy in relation
to himself as materially bound to the universal of the idea-form. From
the standpoint of Adorno's speculative materialism, the individual, the
particular, the definite, is inextricable from his idea; his "less" than
himself in comparison with the free humanity, the humanitas his idea
implies is also the "less" of the operational concept (the application of
A=A) in relation to what it itself means in the impossibility of its iden
tity (the negativity inscribed in A=A). Indeed, the individual consid
ered according to his species-being, as being in contradiction with his
own meaning, would only be himself?would only not be "less" than
himself?"by voiding that contradiction?in other words, by achiev
ing an identity of the particular [his individuality as content] with its
concept [his universality as form]."45 It is the experiential longing for
this "voiding" that characterizes the torn individual, in his negative
identity, as exemplifying the unresolved identity of the idea.
186 | MAX BLECHMAN
As such, morality in thought?the self-consciousness of the ascrip

tion of the idea?maintains a tension in two essential respects. On the
one hand, it must affirm its own negativity against the hypostasis of
the concept that would feign a positive identity, that is, that would
pass as the achieved mediation of form and content. In this respect,
the "more" of the individual is the "more" in relation to the "less" of
this operation of mediation, it signifies the necessary protest against
an application of the concept that would knock down the Utopian "not
yet" to the identitarian realism of "what is." It is the imperative dif
ference in identity, the "not yet" coextensive with moral being, that
pushes Adorno to stress that the individual must "hold on to that of
which the general concept robs him."46 But this "holding on" signifies
also a struggle against the formalization of the concept, against the
reification of the material reality?and the historical possibility?con
tained in the idea.
Morality in thought is the expressive pang of this negatively ex
perienced "more." Phenomenologically, this means that the melan
cholic experience of the "less" puts the emphasis on the "more" that
the individual is in the form of not yet being it?i.e., on the pledge of
an identity itself prefigured as potential. As such, if the individual
must be wary of trivializing the concept in the self-preservation struc
tures of extant existence?if he must be "concerned with that 'more'
of the concept compared with his need"47?the potential in the idea
calls simultaneously "for criticizing what an inevitable formalization
has made of the potential."48 The tension implicit in the individual's
moral self-understanding expresses the as yet unfulfilled promise of
the real. If the "more" and "less" of morality in thought is the nega
tive condition of the individual's self-knowledge as idea, the idea is
not for all that a pure aperception pointing abstractly to a condition
beyond all experience. Knowledge of the idea is knowledge experi
enced by the individual as his essential historical destiny. Only, by
contrast to the priority of realism in Hegelian identity-thinking?in
the last instance, the "brutality of coercion that creates the semblance
of reconciliation"49?this knowledge highlights the quintessence of
what is in the form of an ongoing severance.
This severance is not, Adorno emphatically contends, to be un
derstood as primarily ontological. To the contrary, the inner tension
of consciousness has its material grounds; it is at bottom historical,
"NOT YET" | 187
coterminous with the hegemonic domination of bourgeois civilization.

The point of morality in thought is not to take "its directive, beyond
the real states of affairs, from the highly formal sense of belonging to
oneself."50 The chasm in the idea of the individual, the alienation of
the happiness and dignity of the species to which the individual be
longs, expresses the powerlessness and nothingness of a social condi
tion to which he equally belongs and not, as it were, the condition of
his "substance" per se. A certain existentialism, and a certain emphasis
on the existential in Hegel, is antipodal to the speculative material
ism?the negativity of the historical human being qua humanity?that
underscores Adorno's critical conception of morality. The realization
of the nothingness of the human being in present society is trans
posed conveniently by the existential thinker to the pure essence of
the individual, indirectly affirming and eternalizing the very condi
tion that stands in need of critique. The reification of human sociality
is in this way reworked into the sublimity of human nothingness at
the same time that the guiding idea of revolutionary humanism from
Kant to Marx?namely, man's species-being?is plundered in the name
of finitude and authenticity. The individual caught in the conditions
of the present stage of society, Adorno laments, is being robbed of
"precisely those traits which have, as their content, the criticism of
those states of affairs."51 In a striking passage of The Jargon of Authen
ticity that reveals at once the historical debt and the parti pris of his
own moral thinking, Adorno states:
This criticism has been immanent in all enlightenment, as well as in

early German idealism. The [existential] jargon goes hand in hand with
a concept of Man from which all memory of natural law has been erad
icated. ... As it runs in the jargon: suffering, evil, and death are to be
accepted, not to be changed. The public is being trained in this tour de
force.... They are learning to understand their nothingness as Being, to
revere actual, avoidable, or at least corrigible need as the most humane
element in the image of Man. They are learning to respect authority in
itself because of their innate human insufficiency.52
The critical edge of this accusation holds good before Wittgen

stein's maxim "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."53
For at the heart of Adorno's unequivocal defense of natural law is
a vital human goal and Utopian a priori which, while it resists clear
and distinct representation, nonetheless coheres in reflection with the
188 | MAX BLECHMAN
material origin integral to critical reason. Here again, the contradiction

is to be understood in relation to the historical present: it expresses
what is "objectively, not just epistemically, unresolved."54 Critical rea
son has as its starting-point an end, an imperative fulfillment that
contradicts the present reification of consciousness; thus, compliance
with the rules of the game of extant consciousness would be tanta
mount to reason's own negation. Indeed, "to lay contradictions to
incorrigible speculative obstinacy would be to shift the blame."55 The
significance of maintaining in reflection the contradiction coextensive
with speculative materialism is reason's refusal, as the polemos of moral
ity, to be talked out of the cornerstone of its dignity and hope.
Which brings us back to the Utopian truth-content of morality in
thought, its heterogeneity to the identity thinking that seeks to dis
close the particular with the universal. The resistance of morality in
thought to the established state of affairs is the consciousness of the
universal as being universal in the modality of not being the univer
sal it ought to be. Yet this resistance, as the expression of the damaged
particular, is the consciousness of the universal as its own damaged
identity. In other words, what this understanding of the damaged iden
tity of identity and difference underscores is that the extant identity
of identity and difference is not what it should be. 'A' doesn't equal
'A' in the very precise sense that 'A' is aware that in its identity to 'A'
it is not really itself. In A=A, particular 'A' recognizes itself in uni
versal 'A' as "less" than itself?the equation fails to do justice to the
truth-content of its "more." But because, in another sense, 'A' does
equal 'A'?because the particular is inextricably bound to the whole
of which it is a part?universal 'A' itself is not itself, is itself "less" than
itself, itself radically belying its universality. On this score, Adorno's
sharp verdict on Hegel could hardly be more lucid:
He lacks sympathy with the Utopian particular that has been buried
underneath the universal?with that nonidentity which would not come
into being until realized reason has left the particular reason of the uni
versal behind. The sense of the wrong implied by the concept of the uni
versal, a sense which Hegel chides, would deserve his respect because
of the universality of wrong itself.56
The terms of the particular/universal relation are thereby reversed.

It is not the extant universal, but the Utopian particular that carries
"NOT YET" | 189
the rational universal. Inversely, the "universal" that feigns to pass as

universal is itself merely particular, which as universal wrong consti
tutes the real object of realized reason's negation. By this reconstruc
tion of the particular/universal relation according to the truth-content
of the "not yet," morality in thought retrieves the critical moment of
Hegelian dialectics?the Utopian substance of the "lingering with the
negative." Adorno's "utopian particular" is none other than Bloch's
"deepest Utopian part of the conscience"57?in every instance, the con
sciousness that the purported identity of the universal is "perpetuat
ing nonidentity in suppressed and damaged form.""s
An unresolved question lingers: how are we to understand conscience

in its link with the "utopian"?what in the last instance is the signifi
cance of this qualifier? I have suggested that for Adorno this self
transcending disposition of human intelligence advances knowledge
only by way of a negative phenomenology, that the material content
of this knowledge is itself negative. Rather than constituting a fully
determined representation of the right, the unhappy consciousness of
conscience is the alarm that signals a wrong. This capacity of the mind
is shrugged off as a form of deluded subjectivism only by neglecting
the material mainspring of moral criticism:
Conscious unhappiness is not a delusion of the mind's vanity but some

thing inherent in the mind, the one authentic dignity it has received in its
separation from the body. This dignity is the mind's negative reminder
of its physical aspect; its capability of that aspect in the only source of
whatever hope the mind can have.^
The unhappy consciousness of conscience highlights an "authentic

dignity" of the mind's separation from the body in that it is responding
to?and instigating?something beyond individual self-preservation
and need. Yet the alarm of conscience is itself deeply physical, and it
articulates an urge that is no less human and embodied. It is as if a
specific somatic sensitivity of the mind, an upsurge of moral pain,
were reproduced in thought as a conscious object of reflection, con
stituting an advancement of knowledge by way of a quasi-corporal
refusal of untruth. In this way, the unhappy consciousness, as the con
sciousness of a universal that is not one, is also the conscious unhap
piness of the universal, its inner principle of unrest. The unassuaged
190 | MAX BLECHMAN
consciousness of conscience is the universal in the form of negativity:

the break in the universal it unveils advances the universal by remind
ing it that it is not yet itself. Which is another way of saying that the
heterogeneous moment of conscience prefigures the universal, brings
the universal to itself negatively, by pointing out that the universal's
identity is reproducing itself as coercive mythology. Conscience in
dexes the universal in the form of the imperative that the unhappiness
incurred by extant "universality" should be undone:
The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all
the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering: "while
there is a beggar, there is a myth," as Benjamin put it. This is why the
philosophy of identity is the mythological form of thought. The physical
moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things
should be different. "Woe speaks: 'Go.'" Hence the convergence of spe
cific materialism with criticism, with social change in practice.60
Conscience is therefore not limited to a moral self-certainty that

would preclude the need of critical reflection. To the contrary, the "spe
cific materialism" implied by conscience is also that which highlights
the need for such reflection. Conscience is the consciousness that the
damage the universal is incurring is inextricable from the damage it
is itself suffering. The more the objective universal monopolizes the
means for maintaining the myth of its identity, the less moral insight
has any lease on a space that would, as it were, allow it to manifest its
ingenium independently. As such, conscientious criticism?the "con
vergence of specific materialism with criticism"?is immanently aware
that "whatever an individual or a group may undertake against the
totality they are part of is infected by the evil of that totality."61 In
other words, the objective conditions of human sociality?according
to Adorno, the real secularization of original sin in modernity?neces
sitates conscience's reflection on its own grounds lest it reveal itself
as irrational as the "rationality" it is contesting. The very dynamic to
which conscience responds, as well as the conditions for its effective
possibility, bar "any single moral decision from being warranted as
the right one"62 at the same time that they necessitate recourse to ratio
nal exposition and "the most advanced state of theory."63
Yet formulating matters in this way remains unsatisfying. "Ad
vanced theory" is no more capable of securing itself from the whole of
instituted irrationality than is rational exposition safe from the dealings
"NOT YET" | 191
of rationalized heteronomy At bottom, "without recourse to the mate

rial, no 'ought' could issue from reason."64 This means that at the heart
of the genuinely rational, at the core of morality in thought, there is a
material urge?an experience of an "ought" that breaks out from the
limits of dominant sociality. It is precisely this experience that marks
the starting-point of any genuine critical theory. The "recourse to the
material" Adorno is here emphasizing is incomprehensible simply
in the terms of extant forms of sociality or their latest forms of self
understanding?indeed, such a simplification would render unintel
ligible the ground of possibility for their contradiction. Rather, the
"material" in question is that of the human being as such, that which
constitutes the individual in his humanity, and that of a conscious un
happiness in a state of affairs experienced as dehumanizing. If the "objec
tivity of conscience vis-a-vis mankind is drawn from the objectivity
of society,"65 it remains that conscience is, in its very dynamic, already
transcending itself as a product of society. Such is the voice of con
science, the contradiction of the utopian idea: it calls upon thought
"to rise above the individuality that exists as well as above the soci
ety that exists."66 At the end of the day, it is not only as consciousness
of wrong but also as presentiment of a sociality that is not yet and
ought to he, that conscience establishes itself as "the mark of shame of
an unfree society."67 Ripening in conscience "is a potential that would
rid men of coercion"; it is the task of critique to retrieve this potential
"in the objectivity of a reconciled life of the free."68
I am arguing that Adorno's negative dialectics structures a material

ism rooted in the historical negativity of conscience, just as the antin
omies of Kant's philosophy turn on the pivot of practical reason, and
are "resolved" only by a moral-mindedness construed as irreducible.
And I hope to have made it clear that this resumption of Kant?this
solidarity with "metaphysics at the time of its fall"69?ultimately quali
fies Kant as much as it does Hegel. To "let Kant burn through Hegel"
is to rethink conscience as the consciousness of my own nonidentity
From this perspective, Kant's unknowable object of metaphysics rep
resents the alterity of practical reason, the consciousness of reason's
dependence on that which "cannot be wholly translated into its the
oretical determinants without remainder."70 At stake is a reinterpre
tation of freedom in the midst of nature, according to which the somatic
192 | MAX BLECHMAN
aspect of the mind acts as a self-transcending and self-transforming

interlocutor. Indeed, the "projecting element" of conscientious reflec
tion, this "little piece of our nature that is not nature,"71 is precisely
what makes self-consciousness?that is, the consciousness of my own
alterity?a power that can resist the administered consciousness of
reified, bourgeois society.
The point, therefore, is obviously not to return to the Kantian
moral law as to an ontological ground of rational identity, nor for that
matter to make the practice of deliberative reason the substance of
morality. Rather, Adorno wants to highlight the inexpungible grounds
of subjective freedom, the inexpugnability of a human negativity that
tends towards self-transformation and resistance. This is to say that
awareness of the factum of conscience?however much it may be medi
ated socially, and not withstanding its having to be justified ratio
nally?represents a rupture of the moral mind, a capacity "to confront
prevailing norms with our own consciousness and to measure each
against the other."72 Whence Adorno's effort to underscore the pre
science of Kant's postulation that "man's nature itself contains some
thing like a promise that this is not all, that there must be something
further"?or, for that matter, his otherwise startling contention that
"the ontological proof of the existence of God, which Kant himself
subjected to withering criticism, continues to live on."73
For there is no overlooking the alternative sequence of trailblazers
on the pathway of the "melancholy science." At his most empirical,
Adorno is simultaneously rescuing that which Kant posits as the
inherent human disposition towards metaphysics (metaphysica natu
ralis),74 that is, a human need strictly analogous to Ernst Bloch's "other
hunger . . . the continual Not-Yet of human possession."75 The onto
logical proof, then, "lives on" in the most elementary sense defined
by Aristotle: in the innate movement of form in matter, in the "intrin
sic activation" that drives body and mind towards the ethical sub
stance, the perpetually open possibilities of the real.76 And it "lives
on" in the face of an entelechial process that "is tending to become
paler and more desultory," to the point that today it "survives only
negatively."77 It is as if this process were simultaneously caught in the
progressive detachment of form from life?in the estrangement of
form in a power that acts over and against life?only to instill thereby
a negative awareness of its original ends, as well as the resistance that
"NOT YET" | 193
would uphold them. Indeed, if, for Adorno, "the concept of metaphys
ics has been transformed to its innermost core,"78 is it not because today
"the possibility of metaphysical experience is akin to the possibility
of freedom . . . one that has torn the bonds advertised as salutary"?79
As seen, Adorno does not hesitate to speak of natural law when
he thinks the perseverance of a morality that undermines its own pet
rifaction. m In a sense, the restructuring of materialism so as to include
metaphysica naturalis already opens this door. Once spiritual need is
recognized as material need?once moral aversion to injustice is seen
as an extension of the natural aversion to physical pain?the whole
"ought" of collective self-transformation is placed on the axis of a
self-constituting dignity in human nature, as if without this grounding,
there could be no morality to be had or to be measured. Awareness of
the factum of conscience?"the awareness that the sphere of right action
does not coincide with mere rationality, that it has an 'addendum'"?
thus underscores a practical reason that contains within itself the in
telligence of an unyielding, rebellious nature.81
Clearly, Bloch encouraged Adorno to think the "specific materi
alism" of his morality under the sign of natural law and to revalue
"utopian-conscience-and-knowledge" as a mainspring of modern
resistance.82 Far from indexing extant institutions and ideology, Bloch
staged natural law?in a reinterpretation of the Cynics, the Stoics, and
of Rousseauism?as dissidence in the face of "the idolization of exter
nal correlates."83 For Bloch, the givenness of natural law is essentially
dialectical. As it were, the negativity of natural law permanently tran
scends the positivity of its social codification, sparking an inexhaust
ible responsibility, that of "passing beyond givenness, in the belief that
present existents must be pushed aside in order to liberate and open
the way to a better status."84 Thus, the pain conscience suffers in fact
expresses the material origin of immanent critique: it is at the heart of
the utopian ideals that have informed modern revolutions and institu
tions, and it signals the ongoing capacity to resist historical departures
from what was intended by them.85 In a word, "utopian-conscience
and-knowledge" burns through its own objectifications in view of
rescuing their truth-content.
It is this nonidentity that compels Adorno to tarry with the par
ticular that resists the social norms that have grown extraneous to
it. At stake is pointing?beyond the purported preservation and
194 | MAX BLECHMAN
transcendence of morality in modern Sittlichkeit?to the imperiled ori

gin of dialectical thinking, to the "utopian thinking, the thinking that
conceives the difference from what exists."86 To take Utopian conscience
as a key to Adorno's dialectics is to take this "difference from what
exists" as the substance that drives his dialectics' negative qualifier.
The dialectic of the universal and the particular is brought over to the
concrete particular for the precise reason that it is here, at the micro
logical level of moral-mindedness, that Adorno finds the Utopian neg
ativity that had always guided his critical theory.
Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience," in

Notes to Literature II, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), 211-12. The importance of Ernst Bloch's thought for Adorno has received
very little attention in English criticism. We may note, however, Susan Buck
Morss's terse assessment: "reading the nonidentity of the particular as a promise
of Utopia was an idea that Adorno took from Ernst Bloch." See her The Origin of
Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute
(New York: The Free Press, 1977), 76. See also the 1964 discussion between Bloch
and Adorno: "Something Is Missing: On the Contradictions of Utopian Longing/'
in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack
Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Tech
nology, 1988). 117. For an overview of the Bloch/Adorno relationship, see the spe
cial issue of Europe devoted to the subject (Europe 86, no. 949 [May 2008]: 3-253).
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (Cam
bridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), 136.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 19, 43.
4. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford Uni
versity Press, 2000), 185.
5. Adorno, Hegel, 86.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1973), 314.
8. Ibid., 136.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1978), 50.
10. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 186.
11. Ibid., 184. It is in this precise respect that we may describe Bloch as a
"post-Hegelian Kant" (Paul Ricceur, "La Liber te Selon l'Esperance," in Le Conflit
des Interpretations: Essais d'Hermeneutique [Paris: Seuil, 1969]), or, more precisely, as
"NOT YET" | 195
a Marxist Schelling (J. Habermas and Ernst Bloch, "Ein Marxistischer Schelling?"
Philosophisch-Politische Profile, I [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973]). In other words, the
"return to Kant" that is here operative is of an order other than the political, moral,
and epistemological agnosticism characteristic of liberal neo-Kantianism. At issue,
as Bloch writes in his 1963 postface to The Spirit of Utopia (279), is a "new, utopian
kind of philosophy"?a reawakening of "revolutionary gnosis." "Letting Kant
burn through Hegel" therefore signals a two-way movement: breaking the limits
set by Kant on theoretical reason in favor of Hegel's historical, speculative reason,
but rendering speculative knowledge in terms of the living and demanding
knowledge of conscience and practical reason.
13. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 307.
14. Ibid., 307-8.
15. Hegel, Phenomenology, 33.
16. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 246.
19. Ibid. The parallel with Bloch is striking. As Pierre Bouretz puts it, "To
answer the question of human meaning by the reality of the world; to displace
conscience's thirst for the infinite by the rationality of things; finally, to assuage
the dissatisfaction of the moral subject in the experience of evil by means of a con
ciliatory contemplation of history: these are the elements of the Hegelian attitude
that motivate Bloch to turn back on his tracks and to find in Kant more authentic
figures of the human spirit." See his Temoins du Futur: Philosophic et Messianisme
(Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 5S5.
22. Ibid., 247. The critique of the untruth of the whole demands the critical
independence of the particular, but if the particular is necessarily mediated by the
whole of which it is a part, it becomes difficult to see how its critique of the whole's
partiality would not be likewise infected. The problem is internal to immanent
critique, as Adorno admits in his essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Theo
dor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1981).
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 88.
27. Ibid.
28. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 17.
29. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74. For Adorno, the "beautiful soul" standpoint
is at once necessary to moral thought (Kant's metaphysical dualism) and morally
impossible (Hegel's empirical monism), and self-consciousness of this contradic
tion is precisely what defines the modern moralist's melancholia as both judge
196 | MAX BLECHMAN
and member of society. The science of the good life is a melancholy science, then,
because "wrong life cannot be lived rightly" (Minima Moralia, s. 18)?or in Bloch's
terms, because "only after what is false has fallen away can what is genuine live"
(Spirit of Utopia, 238). Indeed, the extant social ontology that conditions moral
thought as melancholic contradiction points directly to why moral philosophy is
possible only from the standpoint of redemption. Which leaves untouched the
question: how is such philosophy possible?that is, what are the conditions of pos
sibility for this standpoint?
31. Ibid.
32. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 185.
34. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Buffalo: Pro
metheus Books, 1990), 198.
36. Adorno insists that the Kantian block on the intelligible refers to histor
ical as opposed to ontological conditions. The severance of experience into nou
menal and phenomenal realms reflects the emerging exchange-relations that make
human species-being increasingly undefined, abstract, and ethereal, while forcing
the living reality of nature to recede into mere appearance. Thinking Kant in
materialist terms thus means showing how the supposed chasm between reason
and nature is coextensive with the historical alienation of human beings from
each other and from the world. But this also means showing how the Kantian
chasm was meant to preserve in pure possibility?in the realm of genuine self
determination and freedom?the promise of an authentic human universality. In
this sense, the transcendent object of the block?the practical content of the tran
scendental subject?points to "the overall social rationality in which the utopia of
a rationally organized society is already implicit." See Theodor W. Adorno, Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 172-73.
37. Ibid.
38. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 65.
39. Ibid., xi (translation modified).
40. I am borrowing the term "speculative materialism" from Hans-Heinz
Holz (Logos Spermatikos [Darmstadt-Neuwied: Luctherhand, 1975], cited in Arno
Miinster, Ernst Bloch: Messianisme et Utopie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1989], 244). I believe it also usefully captures Adorno's attempt to transform his
torical materialism into critical theory: that is, to take the Utopian truth-content
of speculative idealism as immanent to materialist method. As such, speculative
materialism implies a radical reinterpretation of subjective cognition in light of
the mind's physicality, or what Adorno calls its "immanent somatic side" (see the
chapters Passage to Materialism, Materialism and Immediacy, and Suffering Phys
ical in Negative Dialectics). In this respect, what Arno Miinster says of Bloch equally
"NOT YET" | 197
applies to Adorno: "By contrast to Lenin who states that matter and objective real
ity exist independently of human consciousness, Bloch suggests that being and
consciousness are but two aspects (products) of matter." Or more poetically: "Man
is created from matter, he is its child: in him matter opens its eyes and is reflected"
(Ernst Bloch, Messianisme et Utopie, 249). We may note that this led both Bloch and
Adorno to Schelling's conception of the urge: "And thus, from the bottom stage
on, we see nature follow its inmost, most hidden desire to keep rising and advanc
ing in its urge, until at last it has attracted the highest essentiality, the pure spiri
tuality itself, and has made it its own" (F. W. Schelling, Die Waltalter, ed. M. Schroter
(Munich: Biederstein, 1946), 136, cited in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202).
41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150 (emphasis mine).
42. Ibid., 150-51.
43. Ibid., 151.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
50. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowsky and
F. Will (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 115.
51. Ibid., 65.
52. Ibid., 65-66.
53. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, cited in Adorno,
Hegel, 101.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 318. The conflict thus involves a fundamental opposition of world
views: for Adorno, to "let Kant burn through Hegel" is to claim against Hegel that
"evil rules in this world, that this world is the realm of evil." (See T. W. Adorno,
Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. R. Livingstone [Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001], 149.) In other words, Kantian Moralitat is ultimately more truthful
than Hegelian Sittlichkeit precisely because the modern world is such that norma
tive primacy must be given to individual resistance before given circumstances
and existing social institutions.
57. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 186.
59. Ibid., 203.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 243.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 242.
64. Ibid., 243.
65. Ibid., 282.
198 | MAX BLECHMAN
66. Ibid., 283.

67. Ibid., 275.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 408.
70. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 9.
71. Ibid., 103.
72. Ibid., 123.
73. Ibid., 151. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 385, where Kant's critique
of the ontological proof is shown to have the "must" of human self-transcendence
as its guiding principle, in the same spirit as Beethoven's Kantian Hymn to Joy.
74. Kant, "The Universal Problem of Pure Reason," Critique of Pure Reason,
12.
75. Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the King
dom, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 264.
76. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. H. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin,
1998), Lambda 7: 374.
77. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. E. Jephcott
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 143.
78. Ibid., 110.
79. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 396-97.
80. In addition to the passage in The Jargon of Authenticity cited above, see
Negative Dialectics, 310: "it is the idea of natural law which critically maintains the
untruth of positive law." Adorno's statement recalls the critical consciousness
behind the English, American, and French traditions of dissent, in which natural
law and conscience, situated by Locke to the periphery of a society based on
property, became the banner under which social orders were criticized and trans
formed. For a penetrating account of how a new awareness and language of con
science informed early modern revolutionary criticism, see Staughton Lynd,
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Vintage, 1968).
82. Ernst Bloch, A Philosophy of the Future, trans. D. Schmidt (Cambridge,
Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1981), 91.
83. Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. D. Schmidt (Cam
bridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1986), 192.
84. Ibid., 206.
85. Bloch, A Philosophy, 91.

"Not Yet" Adorno and The Utopia of Conscience

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"Not Yet": Adorno and the Utopia of Conscience

Author(s): Max Blechman

?T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Cultural Critique 70?Fall 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota

Hegel mechanism structures a permanent melancholic dissonance from

the Kantian autonomous subject by linking the inextinguishable ques

presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth,

A unique site is available for examining the tensions of this paradox

human beings' genuine self-determination, shines through it."33 The

2) Simultaneously, the materialist immersion in the historically real

The duality of consciousness?as historically immanent and tran

Because the concept is only a concept insofar at it is equated with what

As such, morality in thought?the self-consciousness of the ascrip

coterminous with the hegemonic domination of bourgeois civilization.

This criticism has been immanent in all enlightenment, as well as in

The critical edge of this accusation holds good before Wittgen

material origin integral to critical reason. Here again, the contradiction

The terms of the particular/universal relation are thereby reversed.

the rational universal. Inversely, the "universal" that feigns to pass as

An unresolved question lingers: how are we to understand conscience

Conscious unhappiness is not a delusion of the mind's vanity but some

The unhappy consciousness of conscience highlights an "authentic

consciousness of conscience is the universal in the form of negativity:

Conscience is therefore not limited to a moral self-certainty that

of rationalized heteronomy At bottom, "without recourse to the mate

I am arguing that Adorno's negative dialectics structures a material

aspect of the mind acts as a self-transcending and self-transforming

transcendence of morality in modern Sittlichkeit?to the imperiled ori

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience," in

66. Ibid., 283.

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