Since our identity is mediated and constituted through the past, we reach ourselves through history. Thus history puts ourselves into question and becomes the most dangerous place. History of philosophy may have revolutionary consequences, as far as it destroys this or that fable convenue. History puts us to the test. Historians are not making “the leisurely stroll of the pampered owner in the garden of the past”; rather they are path finders. Today, Socrates would do history.Footnote 1
Preface: Whose Anxiety? Or the Return of the Repressed
The rapid proliferation and great diversity of philosophical writings on the theologico-political question in the past few years are unprecedented since the seventeenth century of which it is the mirror image.Footnote 2 But, whereas the former was a response to the wars of religion which followed the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the breakup of the universal church and sought to either limit, control, or even eliminate the role of religion in civil society and the nascent nation-state, the latter was a response to the insistent return of religion to the public sphere and the demise of the modern nation-state. Both responses can be said to be motivated by a concern for freedom, albeit different forms of freedom – freedom from religion or freedom of or rather for religion. And, it is both remarkable and ironic that, in the face of the disintegration of the modern nation-state and the economic institutions sustaining it, religion becomes an urgent question for philosophers, especially liberal political philosophers and, more broadly, philosophers of the Left.
This is a poignant irony because religion has always remained such a question in another, occluded philosophical tradition, a materialist Aristotelian one, whose repression is predicated upon the unified version of the philosophical tradition, itself an effect of religion or, more precisely, Christianity. The first Modern voice of this materialist tradition is Spinoza's; his rarely acknowledged heirs are Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Adorno. When not literally occluded, these thinkers have either been expelled or exiled themselves from the dominant philosophy contemporaneous to them, relegated to other forms of academic discipline. Leibniz severed his conversation with Spinoza upon publication of the Theologico-Political Treatise, and the “Spinoza Controversy” (Spinosismusstreit) governed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical and literary landscape; Marx was relegated to Social Science and subsequently exiled from that science as well with the ascendancy of quantitative Social Science, because of a reductive misreading of one thesis; Freud and psychoanalysis were expelled from philosophy even as Aristotle's de Anima and commentaries on it continued to be read and, often, by the same philosophers. Benjamin is still rarely ready by philosophers and is often ignored by Critical Theorists, and Adorno still remains on the margins of philosophy. The powerful philosophical resistance to these thinkers marks the very high stakes: namely, the nature of philosophy. In the case of Adorno the stakes get even higher, especially since to the question of philosophy is added the question of Left politics. Ironically, if not surprisingly given the stakes, benign forgetfulness has also served as safeguard against the distortion demanded by inclusion. The most striking example of this “neglect” is the invisibility of Spinoza's profound influence on Marx's and Freud's critiques of religion. A less benign form is the erasure of the radical differences between Judaism and Islam as legal traditions concerned with orthopraxy and Christianity as a doctrinal tradition concerned with orthodoxy. This erasure is also central to all readings of Adorno's Negative Dialectics as a negative theology.
Part I. The Enigma of Spinoza
The past few years have witnessed and continue to witness a strange literary phenomenon in the form of publications in English of a surprising number of books devoted to Spinoza, a philosopher whose enigmatic status in the history of philosophy is evident in the ebb and flow that characterize the afterlife of his works from the seventeenth century on. Many of these books are translations of French texts written in the past twenty years, one is a new biography, and others are influenced by new directions in philosophy, both Analytic and Continental, and reflect contemporary concerns to which Spinoza's works seem to provide “new” insights. Together with the renewed generative impetus to scholarship occasioned by the “rediscovery” of Spinoza's numerous works, new English translations have been published in the past few years, including two different translations of Spinoza's Collected Works, and three of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.Footnote 3
To my knowledge, no philosopher has been simultaneously embraced and rejected for as many reasons as has Spinoza. At the same time as Spinoza was read as a rationalist, he was also read as a mystic; the same elements that have led to his description as a “God intoxicated man” gave rise to the accusations of pantheism and, most frequently, heresy; and the same “heresies” for which he has been denounced by some philosophers and theologians are the ones celebrated by others. Who was this elusive philosopher, and why did he generate responses as passionate as they were diverse? Was Spinoza a critical follower of Descartes, but a follower nonetheless, or a precursor of German Idealism? Was he a significant forebear of Idealism's critics (Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx) or a precursor of contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience (Churchland, DamassoFootnote 4), on the one hand, feminist philosophy (Gatens and LloydFootnote 5), on the other?
The diverse forms taken by the recent resurgence of interest in Spinoza's works are strikingly similar to their previous destiny, with one exception: the repeated condemnations have been replaced by a celebration of his secular heresy by philosophers of radically different ilk. Thus, for example, both Steven Smith,Footnote 6 who reads Spinoza as the father of liberalism, and Antonio Negri,Footnote 7 who reads him as a proto-Marxist, regard him as their forebear. And this is but a meager list of the contradictory ways in which Spinoza was and continues to be read, rejected, or dismissed. Stuart Hampshire's 1962 stunningly frank reflection upon this “peculiar phenomenon,” a reflection which he repeated at least twice, is as apt today as it should have been since the seventeenth century: “I believe that everyone who has ever written about Spinoza, and who has tried to interpret his thought as a whole, either has been, or ought to have been, uneasily aware of some partiality in his interpretation, when he turns once again from his own words to the original.”Footnote 8 In a different but equally disclosive way, the most recent publication of a literary text described on the book jacket as “a philosophical romance of attraction and repulsion, greed and virtue, religion and heresy,” The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World,Footnote 9 exemplifies the problematic force of Spinoza's thought, again both negative and positive, on the imagination of philosophers, scientists, writers, poets, etc. Ironically, the affective power of Spinoza's work simultaneously exemplifies Spinoza's understanding of the power of the affects and often repudiates his conclusions about reason's relative inefficacy over the primary affects, and the effective and affective role of desire in the generation of knowledge as well as prejudice. More important, in all instances of what I describe as celebrations of Spinoza's secular heresy, there is a sense of urgency and anticipation that Spinoza's ethics/politics shield unmined powerful resources whose uncovering or discovery will provide long-awaited responses to the current crises of the authority of reason and of political legitimation, especially in the face of the imminent threat of the barbarism at the heart of culture once again made visible by the radical turn toward religious fundamentalism and reactionary politics.
Since an important dimension of the Spinoza enigma that ought to give rise to a dis-ease with the partiality of our interpretations, but more often does not, is manifest as a desire to specify his philosophical and historical belonging, a desire whose failure is evident in the multiplicity of interpretations, it is clear that any attempt to pigeonhole him must justify its own “objectivity” through highly selective readings. Is he a rationalist? If so, surely in a manner strikingly different than his preeminent purported Continental cohorts, namely, Descartes and Leibniz. Is he one of the first Moderns? Again, if so, surely in a manner distinct from what is traditionally understood by philosophical Modernity. Claims to the former must overlook the lengthy elaboration of the psychology of the affects and the repeated insistence in the Ethics, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and Tractatus Politicus about reason's lack of power over the affects; claims to the latter must overlook his rejection of analytic geometry in favor of a Euclidian one,Footnote 10 and his rejection, in fact ridicule, of teleological causality. More important, these readings ignore the fact that Spinoza rejects teleological causality as a fiction, not because it cannot be reconciled with the mechanical causality of the new physics, which it cannot, but rather because, in a significant way, his physics is not governed by mechanical causality, which is atomistic, but is rather an elaboration of an aspectival dialectic of affection and action, whose origin is an Aristotle as distinct from the later Scholastic one as Arabic and Hebrew are from Latin. The latter claim that Spinoza's understanding of causality originates in his physics, a physics that is Aristotelian in one important respect, brings into relief what in my view is the most pervasive and insidious prejudice constitutive of all readings of Spinoza, especially of the Ethics, namely, the insistence not only that the Ethics is a metaphysics but that Spinoza's ethics and politics are based upon a metaphysics. And, surprisingly, this interpretation is common to almost all readers of Spinoza, past and present, Analytic as well as Continental, including some of the most attentive ones, for example, Alexander Matheron and Etienne Balibar.Footnote 11
Again, ironically, if not surprisingly, the fates of Spinoza's heirs mirror his in many respects. Schelling's and Hegel's violent reinsertions of teleology and free will into Spinozism reappear in the common teleological readings of Marx; mystical readings of Spinoza's third-order knowledge are repeated in Kabbalist readings of Benjamin; and the simultaneous attribution to Spinoza of rationalism and mysticism reemerges in the “Marxist” disdain for Adorno's “privileging” of thinking at the same time as he is viewed as a practitioner of negative theology (Habermas, Finlayson, and even Scholem). These readings are decidedly ahistorical.
What is especially surprising about such readings is not only that they fail to answer the obvious question of “why the Ethics is an ethics,” and circumvent the fact that in the Ethics, Spinoza derides metaphysicians and lumps them together with theologians, but also that they ignore Spinoza's major “metaphysical” claim, namely, that no thing exists meta ta physica, that is, outside nature, a claim whose political implications set Spinoza as far apart from modern political theory as is possible. For, to the same extent that Spinoza insists that there is nothing outside nature, and there can be no dominion within a dominion, to that same extent he considers the civil state (status civilis) as coextensive with the natural state (status naturalis),Footnote 12 so that claims to their real distinction turn nature upside down. For Spinoza, nature is always already political and historical.
Irrespective of the great diversity in the appropriations of Spinoza's thought since their appearance, with very few exceptions, all share one common assumption: the major influences upon Spinoza's thought, negative as well as positive, are those of the Western philosophical canon. This is one of the major assumptions that this book seeks to challenge.
Just as Spinoza's heritage has been occluded by his violent incorporation into the single, Western philosophical canon, a canon whose formation was occasioned by theologico-political prohibition, so is his heritage occluded by similar controversies surrounding the subsequent reception of his works both by self-proclaimed advocates and by adversaries. This book seeks to uncover Spinoza's “other heirs,” those who think the consequences of his thought materially and historically, rather than claiming to be his disciples and violently incorporating him into their metaphysical systems. I am concerned first with Spinoza's occluded influence on Marx, and then with its heritage in Benjamin and Adorno. By focusing on Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, and, to a lesser extent, Freud, the book explores the manner in which, and the extent to which, Spinoza's thought significantly influences their materialist critiques of the philosophy of history not only as a metaphysical fiction but, more important, as a fiction which, under the guise of culture, harbors and shields barbarism. I argue that at stake for these thinkers, albeit in different ways, are two radically opposed notions of temporality and history, an onto-theological future oriented one, and a political one oriented to the past for the sake of the present or, more precisely, for the sake of actively resisting the persistent barbarism at the heart of culture. The more culture insists on its progress beyond barbarism, the more it claims to have overcome the past, the more insidious and invidious are its forms of oppression.
It may seem unwarranted and certainly extravagant to claim that the scholarship on Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno ignores materialist history. Since there can be little doubt that significant scholarship is devoted to situating each of them historically, what is at stake, in my view, is what we mean by materialist history and the manner in which, and extent to which, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history are, respectively, the history of the victors and its justification, both of which determine the manner of their transmission as necessary.
Understood in this light, and as already stated in the introduction, the primary aim of this book is, quite literally, to undo the past, both its pastness and necessity, to undo the “necessity” of what we take to be the history of philosophy both because it is false and because it is the lie or ideology that sustains and perpetuates oppressive institutions, be they “obviously” repressive or insidiously so. I argue that to understand Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno as historical materialists is to understand religion/ideology as material conditions of oppression, immanent critique as practice. Or, differently stated, to understand materialist history dialectically is to understand it a-teleologically, to expose all teleology as theology. More important, to brush history against the grain is also to read history against its dogmatic appropriations, to retrieve other readings, other traditions. Thus, I argue that to understand Marx's radical critique of Hegel's political philosophy is to challenge Hegel's readings of Spinoza with an other reading of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. To understand Adorno's critique of the modern subject is to challenge the Cartesian and post-Cartesian ego, who is fully present to itself and who is master of his will, with a careful reading of the psychology of the affects and the force of the libido in Spinoza's Ethics. To understand Benjamin's critique of the philosophy of history is first to understand his “Theologico-Political Fragment.” In all these cases, the critique of the philosophy of history and the politics entailed by it exposes it as disguised, repressive, and repressed theology. And, although the evidence for Adorno's debt to Spinoza is less direct, his influence on Marx's and Freud's identification of the barbarism at the heart of culture is ubiquitous and that on Benjamin's political philosophy and account of history extensive and profound. The latter's debt to Spinoza is often disputed by readings of Benjamin either as a “Kabbalist” or as a vulgar Marxist, as well as continuous attempts to rescue him from Adorno, exemplified by Habermas. Against these accounts, the book will demonstrate the affinity between Benjamin and Adorno on history and politics. Rereading Benjamin and Adorno in this light, I argue, against widespread opinion, for a dialectically fecund affinity between their works, a reading that, in the spirit of Benjamin's “Theses on the Concept of History,” by refusing to acknowledge differences between minor and major works, between essays and books, on the one hand, epistolary exchanges, on the other, between aesthetics and politics, places their works in different constellations, bringing into relief other, belated possibilities. In so doing, the book also makes manifest the fecundity of a materialist, critical dialectical exchange.
Finally, as a constellation introducing the following section, it is worth recalling that among the historically forgotten dimensions of the occlusions discussed earlier is the origin of Benjamin's proposal to brush history against the grain. This interpretative “method” is a paraphrase of Christianity's claim to brush “Judaism” against the grain, to remove the external, material chaff of the Law so as to expose its spiritual kernel, the first moment of separating members and heart (Romans 10), body and mind.
I. A Clash of Traditions
The original and long enduring impetus to this book came from a growing suspicion that what came to be understood as the tradition of Aristotelian epistemic and moral psychology is an expression of the culmination during the Renaissance of the Western, Christo-Platonic appropriation of Aristotle's work, in particular the de Anima, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Metaphysics.Footnote 13 The overwhelming success of this process, a success greatly aided by the ecclesiastical/political attempts to silence all aspects of the Latin Averroist so-called heresies, foremost among which was the denial of individual immortality, inevitably assured the occlusion or loss of another Aristotelian tradition, the Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic one. Notwithstanding the interesting, even if ironic, light that this occlusion sheds on the role played by theologico-political forces in the shaping of what comes to be understood as the history of the philosophical tradition, my philosophical concerns focus on an occluded, materialist tradition of the de Anima and Nichomachean Ethics, especially their inseparability. For it is this inseparable relation, a relation that establishes the political dwelling of the human soul, that accounts for the heretical status of this other tradition and leads to its repression.
In relation to Spinoza, two decisive links in the transmission of this other tradition to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance are Maimonides or Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Cordova, 1138–Cairo, 1204) and Gersonides or Rabbi Levi ben Gerson (Provence, 1288–1344), both of whose works have been accused of and/or banned for promoting heterodox opinions. Maimonides’ influence on the High Middle Ages is indisputable, although its extent is a matter of debate.Footnote 14 The extensive criticism of his biblical interpretations in the TTP leads most scholars to concede Spinoza's familiarity with his work but conclude that the influence is merely negative and limited to the TTP. Viewed in this light, Maimonides stands for Spinoza's rejection of and by the synagogue. In contrast, Gersonides remains unknown, with very few exceptions. This is especially remarkable given the importance and influence of his astronomical works as well as his writings on Euclidian geometry. What remain entirely occluded and unavailable, however, are his most significant, strictly philosophical works. As the supercommentator on Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle's works, Gersonides is a highly significant source or trace of the transmission of the Arabic, Aristotelian tradition to the Renaissance and seventeenth century. Although in many respects he is its last explicit voice, I believe, and have argued, that he exerted profound influence on Spinoza, who is its last explicit proponent.Footnote 15
In light of my overarching claim about the occlusion of another tradition, I shall first briefly outline two of the most significant differences between the two Aristotelian traditions, especially in relation to the de Anima and the Nicomachean Ethics, and second sketch the philosophical and political consequences evident in and as the Modern philosophical canon.
1. Whereas in the Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic, Aristotelian tradition,Footnote 16 memory is an extension of sensation and imagination or a storehouse of common sensibles and images and thus does not preexist these, nor exist independently of them, in the Latin, Christian tradition, especially after Augustine, memory is a part of the self-subsistent soul.Footnote 17 Thus, even St. Thomas Aquinas, the most radical of the medieval Aristotelians, views memory predominantly as a part of the self-subsistent intellective soul, distinguishing between a sense-based memory, which belongs to the embodied soul, and one that belongs to the separated intellect.Footnote 18 Consequently, in contrast to the materialist, Aristotelian tradition for which where there is no sensation, there is not intellection, that is, where human knowledge is fully embodied, in the Latin tradition for which, in addition to embodied memory, there is an additional power of memory independent of sensation and imagination, whose objects are immaterial, there can be human knowledge strictly independent of sensation. All too briefly and reductively, Descartes's substance dualism is but the conclusion of a progressive separation between body and soul.Footnote 19
2. As with memory so with the will, the Latin Christian tradition posits the will as a part of the self-subsistent intellective soul and understands the upright will as a distinctly intellectual, and therefore active faculty, or as an efficient cause of distinctly human action. Indeed, will as an affect or passion is a mark of the human depravity consequent upon original sin.Footnote 20 Since original sin plays no role in the materialist Aristotelian tradition of the de Anima, since moral, or rather ethical, virtues and normative categories are seen as conventional rather than natural, that is, since good and evil are not ontological or onto-theological categories, the will as an independently active, intellectual faculty does not even enter into the considerations of the nature of human knowledge. Differently stated, whereas in the Latin tradition the will is the faculty of assent to or dissent from not only “the good” but also “the true,” in the materialist tradition, truth requires no assent, and good requires habituation in a concrete convention.Footnote 21 The most important consequence of understanding the will as an independent active faculty, especially when it is combined with memory as a source of knowledge independent of sensation, is the progressive separation of nature and freedom so that freedom becomes essentially freedom from nature rather than being concurrent with it. Whereas for this other Aristotelian tradition the concern with freedom is thoroughly political, for the “unified” Modern tradition, especially from Kant on, the concern is strictly metaphysical. I am convinced that the Latin philosophers’ concern with individual or personal immortality, whose denial was one of the two primary causes of the Averroist controversy, must be understood in this context. Likewise I am convinced that this understanding underlies Modern political philosophy.
The ironic mark of the success of the occlusion of the materialist Aristotelian tradition is that even today most historians of philosophy who are interested in this other tradition read it through a modern lens, as will become evident in my reading of Spinoza and his heirs. In light of my claim that this tradition has been almost entirely occluded, and the contemporary “intuition” that Spinoza's thought harbors, untapped powerful resources for thinking today, before proceeding, and rather than relying upon a contemporary intuition, albeit one shared by diverse philosophers, I shall first outline some pressing reasons for retrieving another Aristotelian tradition and enumerate those aspects of the Latin, Christian tradition, absent from the materialist one but necessary for understanding the emergence of the Modern ethos, an ethos whose purportedly secular garb, even when it appears to be diverse, shields its unifying ecclesiastico-political origins. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that my concern is with retrieving an other tradition so as to simultaneously exhibit the violent, political nature of the constitution of a unified canonical tradition and its optionality, or lack of necessity, rather than with the recovery of the true Aristotle, Spinoza, or Marx. Indeed, for the philosopher who eschews the separation of theory and practice, the philosopher who does not assume her apolitical, neutral isolation, Aristotle, Spinoza, or Marx always offer new insights.Footnote 22
Broadly stated, and viewed in the concrete, highly polemical, and politically dangerous historical context in which Spinoza responded to Cartesian dualism, on one hand, ecclesiastico-political repressions, on the other, it is my claim that uncovering an other, a-dualist (more precisely, Averroian) Aristotelian tradition with which Spinoza was at least as familiar as, in fact more familiar than, he was with the Latin tradition makes visible not only the extent and radical scope of the differences between other modern philosophers and Spinoza but also the non-, indeed antiphilosophical, and decidedly violent origin of the occlusion of the one tradition by the other.Footnote 23
For the purpose of this book, suffice it to enumerate the elements of this occlusion and its fundamental prejudices,Footnote 24 and to underline the fact that they are both the concrete, historical condition for the possibility of a unified, Modern philosophical canon and the specters that haunt and thus constitute the secular double named by post-Modernity. These occlusions as well as specters are in fact the constituent concepts uniquely belonging to Modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, and those that render Aristotle's and Spinoza's thought either entirely opaque or scandalous, or both. The aforementioned occlusions in fact determine the foundation of Modern concepts, whose foundational nature renders them inaccessible to historical critique.Footnote 25 Owing to these occlusions, and against the mythical transparency of the Modern philosophical idiom, its narcissistic enchantment with its own clarity, my discussion will often appear to be awkward, clumsy, uncanny, and, at times, perhaps even unintelligible. Differently stated, to translate into a respectable, familiar language an idiom and thought that have become uncanny owing to occlusion and repression would amount to complicity with, and sanction of violence and its perpetuation. But, to paraphrase Aristotle, “the mark of the educated person is to demand of her subject matter as much clarity as the subject will admit,” or to quote Spinoza, “praeclara tum difficilia quam rara sunt,”Footnote 26 or as Adorno will repeatedly emphasize, “false clarity is another name for myth.” In addition to differences among the philosophers I address occasioned by concrete, material, and/or historical concerns that will emerge in the following chapters,Footnote 27 I must mention one significant distinction between two ethoi, the premodern and modern, that occasions an important shift in mood and intention. Most succinctly stated, whereas the materialism of Aristotle, Maimonides, and Gersonides is a-dualist, that of Spinoza and his heirs is anti-dualist; where the criticisms of other philosophical opinions leveled by the former are a result of shared difficulties, precisely because of a shared ethos of inquiry, Spinoza's criticisms arise from the radical difference between his ethos and that of his late Scholastic predecessors and modern contemporaries. Consequently, whereas the former share their interlocutors’ idiom and understanding of the political basis of normative categories,Footnote 28 Spinoza's idiom involves a devaluation and revaluation of values from the beginning, by deploying all “conventional” terms against the grain.Footnote 29
Of all the aspects of modern philosophy, the one that is literally unintelligible from the perspective of the pre-Modern materialist tradition, but also the one that is foundational to Modern philosophy, is the unified, isolated, or independent subject. For, in the absence of dualism, there can be no determined, unified subject independent of sensible “objects”; rather there is a fluid, aspectival relation between affection and action, the sense, sensation, and sensed, whereby the more an individual is affected, the more she comes to be in act and in turn can affect others in the same respect.Footnote 30 What can be said to be unified is experience (empereia), which comes about by repeated sensations, where sensation is the result of the aspectival relation between the sensing and the sensed.Footnote 31Empereia is indeed material, but it is certainly not immediate, let alone transparent to a sensing subject.Footnote 32 This is one of the most significant dimensions of the materialist tradition that not only becomes literally unintelligible with the emergence of the modern subject but also that is suppressed and repressed. It is in virtue of this repression that John Locke, inter alii, can claim to follow Aristotle and is counted as an Aristotelian. In the light of this brief summary of the occlusion of an other tradition, an occlusion that also renders invisible the optionality of the foundational assumptions of modernity, and hence shield them from critical reflection, I consider it necessary to briefly enumerate them. The distinct aspects of modernity to which the unified subject gives rise are the following:
1. The first aspect is the Modern desire for certainty and hence for a single method or closed system that will guarantee certainty, or what comes to be known as Metaphysics, a metaphysics radically distinct from the premodern desire for truth which, in principle, cannot be attained as such by any subjectFootnote 33 or be pursued by a single method. The latter desire succinctly named by Aristotle's “orektikos nous or orexis dianoetike”Footnote 34 is manifest in a comportment or ethos that regards method, especially the dialectical method, literally as a mode of inquiry into difficulties (aporiae, problemata) on the way to first principles, rather than posits, let alone constructs, a universal method.Footnote 35
2. The second is the subjective construction of concepts (Descartes), political science (Hobbes), language (Leibniz), and system (Kant) that can guarantee a universal method, a construction that requires that intelligibility would reside strictly in the knowing subject rather than be understood as arising from a relation between a sensing knower (“subject of experience”) and a sensible known (“object of experience”). In this manner, indeed, concrete material experience becomes both “vulgar” and unnecessary for, in fact harmful to, knowledge.Footnote 36
3. Third is the emergence of the isolated individual, the thinking and/or believing I,Footnote 37 whose unity and self-identity are guaranteed by a preexisting subjective consciousness that posits itself objectively, that is, as a fully present unchanging identity, in order to cognize itself as a knower and, hence, as the condition for the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever.
4. Fourth is the understanding of time and history as, or more precisely their conflation into, a single linear progression, as distinct from, or more precisely as a rejection of, natural recurrent time.Footnote 38 Concomitant with the conflation of time and history precisely as the rejection of natural time, or of a time that does not come to an end/judgment, is the separation between natural necessity (the domain of mechanical causality, bodies, passions) and human freedom (the domain of history, final causality, reason, free will, and human action).Footnote 39
5. As a consequence of the foregoing, is the separation between theory and practice, knowledge and action, whereby action (praxis/ergon/poiesis/technē) is understood strictly as the application of knowledge. As a further consequence, reason, let alone ethics and politics, becomes progressively instrumental. More precisely, ethics/politics disappears and is displaced by moral philosophy, whose concern is individual felicity or salvation (salus) rather than political well-being (salus publica).
6. Sixth is the emergence of the nation-state, which depends upon the construction of the myth, or the mythopoesis of the state of nature,Footnote 40 the realm of strife, unfreedom, and/or want, from which the purportedly prepolitical, fully constituted individual must escape by alienating her individual will to the common will of civil society, a common will that, in turn, is alienated to the “elected” sovereign will (be it of the many, few, or one) in order to safeguard individual freedom.
7. Finally, what follows from a number of the previous constituent aspects of Christo-Platonic Modernity is the absolute permission to conquer or subdue nature (body/other/Jew) as the condition of both knowledge and “progressive” freedom.Footnote 41
I would also like to note and underline the facts that (1) most of these elements are common to all formulations of Modern philosophy, Analytic as well as Continental, empiricist, rationalist, or idealist; (2) the pre-Modern tradition of philosophy from which it emerges is decidedly Christo-Platonic so that its Plato and Aristotle, inter alii, are “baptized,” or must be sanctioned by ecclesiastico-political permission; and (3) the view of nature, embodiment, and desire that the Christo-Platonic appropriation of ancient philosophy presents can clearly be traced back to the Christian notion of original sin, and its views of progressive history can clearly be traced to Augustine's theology of history that separates the city of men [sic] from the city of God.Footnote 42 The only difference between the Augustinian Weltanschauung and that of the Enlightenment culminating in Hegel's Philosophy of HistoryFootnote 43 is that, in the latter case, the escathon is immanentized, and redemption not only can but will be brought about by progressive human rationality and free will.
Although each one of these aspects could serve to motivate a separate lengthy study of the epistemic status of what is taken to be real, my concern in this chapter is limited to making amply evident their theologico-political origins and the optionality of the single canon of philosophy and its history. More important, since it is my claim that the force of Spinoza's critique derives from another tradition whose idiom is not only strange to the modern reader but also repulsive to her precisely because it challenges the strongly held and defended opinions about a founding father of the reigning tradition rather than engaging in a polemos further than necessary in this broad-survey part of this chapter, I shall first address very briefly the consequences of these “foundational” concepts in Kant's and Hegel's political philosophy, and their striking, if oft ignored, antisemitism, a densely layered antisemitism resulting from multiple expulsions of the Jews, material as well as theoretical.Footnote 44 Since Kant and Hegel are the giant obstacles, so to speak, to uncovering another materialist tradition informing Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno, precisely insofar as they are also their main philosophical interlocutors, I first focus on their thought, especially on their moral philosophy, politics, and history, and then turn to a consideration of negative dialectics as a species of negative theology materially and historically understood in order to situate the difference between the two traditions now in the precise terms of the erasure of the Jewish by the Judaeo-Christian, of ethics/politics by ontotheology.
The suppression of an other Aristotelian materialist tradition from the canon is accompanied or “complemented” by two other expulsions subsequent to the medieval condemnations: the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their dispersion throughout Europe and the “transformation” (or transsubstantiation) of Jews into a concept and a question. It is noteworthy and ironic that the condemnation marked a decidedly antitheoretical shift in the seat of ecclesiastico-political power, a shift that affected the status of the Jew. On one hand, the theological arguments for the importance of the Jew for the escathon, first as exemplar of the misery of those who deny Jesus’ divinity and second as those whose voluntary conversion will usher the escathon, were replaced either by sheer violent forced conversions – conversions which, nonetheless, were never successful enough, never fully believable, and hence neither assured the second coming nor granted the former Jews with equal status – or by mass expulsion decreed by monarchs whose power doubled through their excessive display of piety.Footnote 45 On the other hand, the rearticulation of power rendered the Jews both unnecessary and superfluous to the economy of salvation and hence to its political expression as the “Jewish question.” It is this superfluous status that reemerges in Kant's and Hegel's expulsion of the Jews from the commonwealth (literally, public health) and history.
II. Kant and Hegel: Precursors to Bruno Bauer
It is no exaggeration to claim that the transformation of the relation between necessity and possibility is the sine qua non for understanding Kant's disdain for “vulgar” experience and the transformation of the question of freedom from a concrete political and historical question to a metaphysical question. I wish to suggest that it is also this transformation that renders the Jew (in contradistinction from individual human beings who happened to be Jewish) as a scandalon for Kant, a scandalon whose embodiment doubles as the scandalon at the heart of Kant's moral philosophy.
Before proceeding, and in anticipation of the charge of anachronistic opportunism, a charge I have been known to level against others, in evaluating Kant's and Hegel's judgments about the Jews, judgment often explained away, or rather “justified,” as reflecting the spirit of the age, I reply simultaneously no and yes. No, because this is not an anachronistic reading but rather a historical retrieving of the origins of these prejudices and their concrete de- and trans-formations in order to render them literally historically unnecessary and therefore untrue; yes, because indeed I seek to show that they reflect the spirit of the age and that they remain as a presence in and an uncritical center of the thought of the two pillars of critical and systematic Enlightenment European philosophy.
a. Kant
Two radically distinct claims constitute Kant's judgments about the Jews and Judaism, the one based upon a true premise, even if the conclusions he draws from it are unjustified, the other pure prejudice. Although it is tempting to argue that the latter does not inform the former, it, too, is unjustified. Briefly, the first premise exiles the Jews from religion and hence from universal Church history, or more precisely from the history of faith to which Judaism is said to be opposed as mere positive, that is, political law devoid of any moral content. Hence Kant argues, “Judaism is really not a religion at all but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws and not into a church.”Footnote 46 Rather than evaluate Kant's arguments for his exclusion of the Jews from religion, and before proceeding, I cannot overemphasize one especially peculiar and surprising dimension of Kant's claim, namely, that Jewish strict monotheism and iconoclasm are a primary cause of Judaism's inability, in fact, inhibition to the development of moral inclination. Moreover, in contrast, Kant argues in favor of polytheism as enabling moral development. “Religion would be more likely to arise from a belief in many mighty invisible beings of this order, provided a people conceived of these as all agreeing amid their ‘departmental’ differences to bestow their good pleasure only upon the man who cherishes virtue with all his heart.”Footnote 47 I can think of no claim as perverse as that which insists that false, puerile, subjective superstition is a superior ground for morality as opposed to law. It is especially worthy of note that this claim is the contradictory of Spinoza's critique of religion beginning with the Appendix to Ethics 1.Footnote 48 Nonetheless, this claim is also consistent with Kant's claim about the cunning and purposiveness of nature and the teleology of history throughout the political writings as well as in The Critique of Judgment. Indeed, nothing empirical would convince Kant otherwise, as his familiarity with virtuous Jews, including Mendelssohn, proves. Thus, indeed, Kant grants that individual Jews can attain universal morality, despite their adherence to Judaism as members of the human species.
Kant's claim that Judaism is a strictly a legal-political tradition, that is, that it is an orthopraxy, is certainly true. What is puzzling, however, is that this is the ground for its condemnation, especially since, for one seeking a religion within the bounds of reason alone, it should be its virtue; for Judaism does not instill religious dogmata and hence cannot per se be opposed to reason alone. It is true, and, as Yovel points out, ironic, that Kant's sources for these claims are Jewish, especially Mendelssohn and Spinoza, but it is equally true that Kant ignores or even distorts the philosophical consequences they derive from this.Footnote 49
Kant's second generic claim about Jews and Judaism is not only pure prejudice but also one based upon popular, deliberate Christian distortion. More important, it is this distortion that justifies Kant's exclusion of the Jew from the commonwealth. And this distortion informs Kant's moral philosophy. Briefly stated, Kant repeatedly claims both in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and in Lectures on Ethics that the Jews are a nation of cowards and liars, a national constitution whose origin he attributes to the Talmud, and one which in the Anthropology is also claimed to constitute the Jews as a nation of merchants. It is for this reason that Kant argues that whereas a well-governed commonwealth can protect a multiplicity of religions, it cannot extend this toleration to the Jews. And here, in the Lectures on Ethics, Kant not only excludes Judaism from religion but further claims that the principles Jews pursue in accord with the Talmud, which permits the practice of deceit, are “adverse to the state.” Thus, so long as the Jew remains a Jew, she can neither be free nor become a member of civil society. In the Anthropology Kant provides two distinct accounts of the causes for the constitution (Verfassung) of the Jews as a nation of liars and merchants, accounts he presents as mutually constitutive but which, in fact, can be seen to be in tension with one another, were “vulgar,” that is, empirical history really to inform its historical claim. The first account is misleading because of its partial and ungenerous presentation of the fact of exile: Jews became cheaters “because of their spirit of usury since the exile.” Admitting that “it is hard to conceive of a nation of cheaters,” Kant presents the former “genetic” character as coextensive with the equally peculiar “genetic” fact that the Jews are a nation of merchants “bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity, and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping people among whom they find refuge and even one another.” The ancient superstition is Jewish law. Especially troubling is Kant's transformation of a historical and theologico-political condition into a genetic one. Jews indeed, by decree, were forced to be “non-productive members of society.” In fact, they were not members of society, properly speaking. Nor is Kant ignorant of the fact that Jews were indeed seeking “civil dignity.” His exchanges with Mendelssohn, and Hertz, inter alii, speak for themselves. Formally, it appears as if it is Jewish law or constitution (Verfassung) that both literally and figuratively constitutes the Jews as a peculiar nation, exiles Judaism from religion, and is opposed to the moral law and hence is harmful to other, well-governed nations. Kant thus repeats the oldest Christian claim: Jewish law is the law of the members opposed to the law of the heart; it is the chaff that is discarded in favor of the Christian grain. Jews will cease to be a nation of cheaters and merchants once they cease to be Jews. And yet, the anti-Jewish, seemingly rationally grounded judgment occasionally appears at a much deeper, more affective level. Thus, despite previous praise of Solomon Maimon's understanding of his philosophy in a letter (May 26, 1789) to Hertz (a Jew), in a later letter to Reinhold (a Christian rival of Maimon), Kant makes derogatory claims about Maimon (and Jews in general), seeking to gain importance on the bases of others’ accomplishments (March 28, 1794). Hard to stomach, yes – true, nonetheless.
Now, finally, there is a kernel of truth to Kant's claim that the Talmud permits lying, a kernel that is grotesquely distorted. The Torah and the Talmud are replete with explicit prohibitions against lying, including the famous saying of Rabbi Shimeon ben-Gamliel: “The world endures on three things: justice, truth, peace” (Babylonian Talmud, Avot, 1:18).Footnote 50 Nevertheless, there are circumstances where the Talmud permits lying, of which the most notable and numerous are for the sake of peace. Viewed in the light of Rabbi Shimeon's dictum, peace is the highest good toward which justice and truth strive. Thus understood, Peace is to Judaism what Charity (Caritas, “Love”) is to Christianity; peace is an ethical/political good, love an individual one.
It is thus especially ironic and noteworthy that Kant's best advice to the Jews requires deception. In the Contest of the Faculties, Kant advises the Jews to publicly adopt Christianity and to study the New Testament but to interpret it in accord with morality and Enlightenment. According to Kant, only by means of such deception could Jews be granted equality and citizenship and at the same time overcome historical religions and adopt the religion of reason. It is noteworthy that, Kant describes this transition as the euthanasia of Judaism. Only by deceiving others could the Jew cease to be a deceiver?Footnote 51
b. Hegel
If Kant's antisemitism has received relatively meager philosophical attention, Hegel's received extensive attention, often conflicting, and more often apologetic, albeit to different degrees. As in the case of Kant, so in the case of Hegel, my concern is not with their antisemitism or personal attitudes toward Jews but rather with the place of “the Jew” and Judaism in their philosophy, and especially its concrete political consequences. Whereas Kant remains consistent in his philosophical attitude toward the Jews, Hegel did not, or rather the changes in his attitude are harder to assess or even explain consistently. Rather than enter the fray of the debates well represented and surveyed in Mack and Yovel, I shall limit my discussion to a brief consideration of two dialectically opposed moments in Hegel's philosophical discussion and point to the ironic destiny of his thought. There can be no disagreement that Hegel's views about the Jews underwent radical transformations that are well documented by Yovel. Thus, whereas his earlier writings are rather vitriolically antisemitic, the vitriol and even the predominant, that is, concrete political form of antisemitism disappears from his later writings, especially from the Philosophy of Right.
Rather than begin with the place of Jews in history and the state in Hegel's thought, I begin with what may appear anecdotal but in fact sheds light on the distortion of the history of philosophy by the philosophy of history or rather the unified unfolding of Spirit in time, or rationalization of the real. Unlike Kant or his successors, Hegel acknowledges Arabic philosophy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, The Lectures of 1825–1826, Medieval and Modern Philosophy, and includes Maimonides, whom he later identifies as a Jew, among the Arab philosophers, where he should indeed be included, but for the wrong reasons. There are two especially striking and strange aspects to Hegel's reading: first, he derives all the substantive information he presents from Maimonides and misreads Maimonides. Thus, from Maimonides’ radical critique of Kalam and the Mutakallimun, the dialectical theologians who are, inter alia, the butt of Maimonides’ criticism of the relation between the real and the rational, Hegel derives a positive assessment of the Mutakallimun (whom he names meddaberin, using a transliteration of the Hebrew translation) as “one outstanding philosophical school or sect among the Arabs.” Second, and stranger still, is Hegel's presentation of their thought as a form of Pantheism or Spinozism, “equating God and Substance, the standpoint or general outlook of Oriental, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic writers, historians or philosophers, ” a standpoint of “abstract negativity and complete dissolution,” a claim later repeated in his discussion of Spinoza. Concerning Maimonides, Hegel gets not only his historical facts mixed up, mistaking his places of birth and death (Cordova and Cairo, respectively) but also his philosophical ones, claiming that “like the church fathers and Philo, he takes the historical configuration as fundamental and treats it metaphysically.”Footnote 52 Now, first, nowhere in his critique of Kalam atomism does Maimonides present their thought to equate God and substance; on the contrary. Nor does Maimonides regard the Mutakallimun as philosophers. Second, while the church fathers were indeed influenced by Philo – Judeus to Christians, the Alexandrian to Jews – Maimonides was not, on the contrary.Footnote 53 Third, and most important, Maimonides was first and foremost a political philosopher, as were his preeminent Arabic interlocutors, especially al-Farabi and Ibn-Rushd. In fact, in a chapter preceding the critique of Kalam atomism, Maimonides cites al-Farabi when he accuses the Mutakallimun of seeking to conform what exists to their imagination rather than conforming their imagination to what exists; unable to distinguish between contrariety and contradiction, they invert the relation between the necessary and the possible.
What should be clear even from this brief discussion is that Hegel's reading of the history of philosophy is thoroughly shaped by his understanding of world history and the place of the Orient within it. But, for that very reason, what is especially strange about it is the ignoring of chronology in this presentation, relegating Arabic philosophy to the Orient and abstract negativity despite the fact that he acknowledges that the Arabs had interest in the arts and classical Greek philosophy and that much of Arabic philosophy is commentary on Aristotle's works. That is, Hegel ignores or covers over real Arabic philosophy, replacing it with Kalam as the dominant form of Arabic philosophy. The same strange ignoring of his own chronology of world history, from the Orient to Greece and the Modern (European) World, whose apex is Germany, occurs in Hegel's discussion of Spinoza.
Hegel's decisive misreading and misrepresentation are further evident in his treatment of Spinoza, especially the covering over of his political philosophy and its relation to Maimonides. Hegel's intervention in the Spinoza controversy is thus a one-sided or undialectical one. For the accusations against Spinoza are twofold and are directed at both the Ethics and the TTP. From the reading of the Ethics as a metaphysics arise simultaneously the accusation of pantheism and the description of Spinoza as “a god intoxicated man.” From a Christo-Platonic reading of the TTP independently of the Ethics as well as from concrete theologico-political interests arise the multiple accusations of heresy. However we interpret the relation between Maimonides and Spinoza, the TTP is directly engaged with Maimonides’ work, and its mode of engagement is decidedly political; Hegel's ignoring of the TTP is thus a direct political or theologico-political intervention in the Spinoza controversy, a fact that could not have been lost to Hegel, the careful reader of Jacobi's Über der Lehre des Spinoza.
Hegel's justification of the expulsion of the Jews from world history, even as that prehistory of the “political” Orient, is the result of the fact that the Hebrew Commonwealth and Judaism for Hegel are the realm of absolute unfreedom, an unfreedom whereby even in the act of being set free the Jews remain slaves, their freedom happens to them without being exacted by them and hence without consciousness of freedom. In fact, properly speaking, the Hebrew Commonwealth for Hegel is no commonwealth, perhaps it is even an antistate; for its elaborate laws are not the expression of a consciousness of freedom nor can give rise to it. Consciousness of freedom is the condition sine qua non of entering into world history. In contrast, in the Orient, “people do yet know that the Spirit – the human as such – is free. Because they do not know this, they are not free. They know only one person is free.” Consciousness of freedom arises first in the Greek and Roman world, a consciousness that some are free. It is only in Christianity that consciousness emerges as the recognition of freedom as the freedom of every human, in virtue of being human. Judaism is thus indeed the absolute negativity opposed to Christianity. That is why, unlike other eras and peoples whose historical and dialectical existence is preserved as it is overcome, Judaism cannot be thus preserved. It remains an archaic anomaly that persists alongside world history and the state.
Yet, it is in relation to the place of Jews in the Modern state, that is, in Weimar Germany, that the difference between Kant and Hegel emerges most starkly. Whereas Kant “imagines” an escape for Jews from concrete, empirical history into moral (metaphysical) freedom by deception, in virtue of which the Jew can attain concrete, “vulgar” freedom, Hegel acknowledges the strange and anomalous persistence of the Jews not merely as a historical specter but as a reality in the Modern state. Thus, irrespective of earlier sentiment about Jews and their expulsion from world history as an agent of freedom, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel recommends granting Jews full civil rights because they are “men” [sic]. Succinct as this recommendation is, and despite its seemingly marginal status, relegated as it is to a long asterisk comment, Hegel's argument here is dialectically subtle and complex. Unlike religious sects, such as Anabaptist, Quakers, and so on, who may be regarded only as members of civil society or as private persons and hence toward whom the state can exercise an attitude of “pure toleration,” exempting them from certain duties, Jews should be granted unrestricted civil right. Against the formal claim that Jews are not merely a religious sect but in fact a foreign race (and indeed, against Kant), Hegel first argues here that “feeling of selfhood infinite and free from all restrictions, is the root from which the desired similarity in disposition and ways of thinking comes into being.”Footnote 54 But, in addition, Hegel argues for full Jewish emancipation from the nature of the State as the actuality of the ethical Idea in which the individual self-consciousness finds its substantive freedom, as its essence and the end and product of its activity,Footnote 55 a self-consciousness that Hegel attributes to a sentiment toward the State, that is, a “feeling of selfhood” in relation to the State. In contrast to Kant, Hegel explicitly situates the isolation for which the Jews are reproached (i.e., the tribal nature) in history and institutions. And finally, Hegel argues from experience that to exclude the Jews (even if the State has the “highest right,” i.e., the formal right to do so) “is the silliest folly, and the way in which governments now treat them has proved itself to be both prudent and dignified.”Footnote 56 To deny civil rights to Jews would be to contradict the nature of the State as “absolutely rational.”
It is thus profoundly ironic that Hegel's heirs, especially Feuerbach and Bauer, not only ignore this recommendation but also revert back to Kant's prejudices; it also thereby makes evident the depth and extent of philosophical antisemitism, an antisemitism that, as I shall argue throughout the following chapters, makes amply evident Spinoza's claim that mind is nothing but the idea of body which in its Marxian form reads that self -consciousness is nothing but the expression of the concrete, material institutions. But, as Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno will also make evident merely formal changes in institutions, merely granting Jews and other others civil rights is no emancipation; for civil rights are not coextensive with human rights, or, as Marx will point out, an abyss separates civil society from socialized humanity. Against Hegel's view of the state as well as Bauer's texts on the Jewish question, Marx turns to Spinoza's radical critique of religion as well as his discussion of the Hebrew Commonwealth in TTP, as will become evident in Chapter 2.
It is both ironic and remarkable that Hegel was able to overcome his personal prejudice on the basis of reason, or rather the purported rationality of the State. Yet, it is dialectically contradictory precisely because, at the personal level of morality, of self-consciousness, for Hegel, feeling grounds reason. Irrespective, Hegel's achievement is contradicted by the irrationality of the real, provided that by the real we refer to concrete, material, historical experience. This contradiction is taken up after Marx and, more important, after Auschwitz, by Benjamin and Adorno. Against the formal equality of civil rights, Benjamin, following Marx, will present the institutional irrationality of the real most succinctly, stating that “[w]hile there is a beggar, there is a myth.”Footnote 57 And Adorno, after Auschwitz, will state quite simply that “the whole is false.”Footnote 58
Whereas the first part of this introductory chapter traces the theologico-political unification of the canon through the occlusion of an other materialist, Aristotelian tradition, an occlusion and repression whose preeminent Modern expression is Spinoza's, Part II seeks to uncover another dialectical materialist history in which the radical distance between Judaism and Christianity is explored through an examination of Adorno's negative dialectics as a radical Jewish species of Negative Theology, a thoroughly political one, against his appropriation into a Christian apophatic discourse.
Part II. Toward a Materialist History: Negative Dialectics as a Radical, Secular, or Jewish Species of Negative Theology
The cognitive Utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts without making it their equal.
– ND, 10
– ND, 205
Just as Adorno opens up the Preface to Negative Dialectics with the bold claim that “negative dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition” (verstösst gegen die Überlieferung),Footnote 59 so do I wish to begin my considerations of negative dialectics, the book as well as model of philosophy it practices and proposes, with the bold claim that negative dialectics as a secular or (sive) Jewish negative theology is a phrase that flouts tradition. But, what does flouting tradition mean? Why and how flout it? And, more important for the following discussion and subsequent chapters, whose tradition? These questions are not mere provocations, although they certainly aim to provoke. That Adorno closes the Preface with the anticipation of “attacks to which Negative Dialectics will expose him,” that this anticipation proved to be “prophetic,” and that, irrespective of their diversity, both the attacks and defenses often have an ad hominem component and manifest a need to distance him from or proximate him to Judaism, indicate the need to ask these questions. And, as will become evident, the question of tradition will also become the question of what is meant by “tradition.” Since there is an unbridgeable abyss between the two traditions at the heart of these debates, an abyss willfully invisible to one, all to visible to the other tradition, and since I wish to propose a critical model of the relation between “negative dialectics” and “theology” that flouts the one generally agreed upon by both opponents and exponents of Adorno, I must first briefly but critically engage the model of religion and theology prevalent in the debates about Adorno.
I. A Detour into History: The HyphenFootnote 60
In the opening paragraph of a chapter entitled “The Hyphen,” J.-F. Lyotard, “speaking as a novice,” takes a risk
of approaching a suffering of the breath and of the flesh, of the two together, a suffering that is perhaps the most impenetrable abyss within Western thought. I will be speaking of a white space or blank [blanc], the one that is crossed out by the trait or line uniting Jew and Christian in the expression
As Lyotard's poignant opening lines succinctly indicate, not only is the Judaeo-Christian tradition Christian, but its mode of being Christian constitutes the violent theologico-political history of Western thought as well as its politics.Footnote 62
Unlike Lyotard, I am not a novice, although I did not discover the term or concept “Judaeo-Christianity,” let alone as a single religious tradition common to Jews and Christians, until I was an adult, nor could it have been discovered until relatively recently. More important, neither the term nor the concept “Judaeo-Christian” would have been coherent to the foremost medieval Jewish philosopher, RaMBaM or Moses Maimonides, in contrast to Judaeo-Arabic, for example, the language in which he composed his philosophical and scientific works. I choose Maimonides as exemplar judicially since he was simultaneously a radical Aristotelian philosopher and the strictest advocate of negative predication of the divine names, arguing that the relation between all biblical attributes predicated of both god and humans is one of pure equivocation – a pure homonym. Moreover, Maimonides was the most esteemed medieval Jewish philosopher in the Christian, Latin West, and his influence upon Christian philosophers was most extensive, including, inter multi alii, St. Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, two Christian philosophers presented as practitioners of apophatic philosophy.
Just as Judaeo-Christianity is a Christian mode of erasing the Judaic by incorporation through supersession, so is the incorporation of Jewish “theology” into the apophatic tradition. I must admit that I am, at best, hard-pressed to understand what Habermas or Finlayson, the exemplary negative and positive interpreters of Adorno's purported mysticism, mean by Jewish thought and/or sources. Ironically, Habermas's and Finlayson's philosophical evaluations of the apophatic, respectively negative and positive, determines their respective evaluation of Adorno's Jewish affiliation. Whereas Habermas acknowledges Adorno's Jewish milieu and influences, Finlayson is at great pains to deny these. And it is poignantly ironic that it is precisely the elements that Habermas identifies as Jewish in Adorno's (and Horkheimer's) thought that he also condemns as irrational, contradictory, or bad philosophy. Conversely, and against Habermas et idem alii, Finlayson rescues Adorno as a philosopher by baptism, immersing him as it were in the waters of the Christian apophatic tradition of the Pseudo Dionysus and Meister Eckhart, a tradition that, at its most consistent, requires not only negation but also remotion.
More important, I find especially troubling, even appalling, not only in Habermas and Finlayson but in the general literature about Adorno, the fact that what is identified as Jewish is almost entirely restricted to Kabbalah, or some cognate form of mysticism, rather than philosophy, literature, music, etc. Against this prevalent reading I wish to emphasize the facts that, in addition to the proximity and intimacy between Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, personal as well as philosophical, Adorno writes on Kafka, Bloch, Schoenberg, Kraus, Heine, Lucaks, Mann, Proust, Mahler, et alii. Among his collaborators as well as fellow émigrés are Marcuse, Pollock, Löwenhal, Krakauer, Eisler, Mann, et alii. That Adorno was certainly familiar with German Jewish philosophy, in general, the Marburg Neo-Kantian School, in particular, is clearly evident from the 1934 correspondence with Benjamin about theology. In this light, and in the context of the question of tradition, it cannot be overemphasized that the foremost Marburg Neo-Kantian of the first part of the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen, was especially concerned with the relation between reason and revelation, especially Judaism, and that several of his writings on religion attempted to synthesize Kant and Judaism, just as his preeminent predecessor, Maimonides, attempted to harmonize Aristotle and Hebrew scripture. Exemplary among these are Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) and The Ethics of Maimonides (Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis, 1908). Finally, Adorno was certainly familiar with Scholem's interpretation of the Kabbalah.Footnote 63
Be that as it may, the “Meditations on Metaphysics,” at the end of Negative Dialectics, makes clear the fact that “after Auschwitz,” Adorno fully identified himself as a Jew, compelled as he was by material history. For, indeed, Auschwitz embodied the diabolical execution of the Jewish matrilineal law of descent, a law governing four generations. As Adorno states or confesses,
it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.
Presenting such survival as ridden by drastic guilt, Adorno characterizes the response to it as a nightmare atonement: he who was spared “will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.”Footnote 64
Now, if our sources and influences, rather than our birthright, constitute our philosophical identity, then with one exception all my graduate students, past and present, are “jews,” although few are Jewish. The most significant way in which most of them are jews is their reading of the philosophical tradition against its Christian grain, the grain in virtue of which the “Jews” as concept is the unassimilated, inassimilable other, heteronymous to the Western philosophical tradition and the modern European nation-state.
Rather than go into too great detail arguing against these discussions, I shall very briefly outline the major differences between the two traditions with respect to what is named “negative theology,” a Christian naming, and subsequently discuss what all ignore, and thereby occlude, which ignoring also entails a misreading of the utopian moment in Adorno's thought or the standpoint of redemption, “whose reality or unreality hardly matters.”Footnote 65
Insofar as the majority of the literature discusses Adorno's “negative theology” in relation to the prohibition against graven images, I must begin with this rather telling association. When negative theology is considered in the light of medieval philosophy or theology, the underlying premise, explicit or implicit, informing the association between the negation of divine names and the ban on graven images is that the analogy of predication is the expression of the analogy of being. This is anachronistic even in the Christian tradition, certainly in the case of Aquinas,Footnote 66 and it is false in the Judaeo-Arabic context. Nonetheless, this worry makes evident one of the major differences between the two traditions. An analogy of being in the Christian context is a worry precisely because “god became man.” It is an onto-theological,Footnote 67 strictly Christian worry that gives rise to indefinitely many forms of nominalist–realist debates but, ironically, is of little interest to either philosophical or theological versions of medieval negative theology. In the context of the debates about Adorno, the worry is about the relation between word and image or language and representation. Thus, ironically, it is a version of the nominalist-realist debate after Leibniz, Kant, and Brentano,Footnote 68 again, a decidedly Christian, onto-theological worry. Nonetheless, insofar as one of Adorno's central concerns is the presentation of what is in excess of the concept, as well as the violence wrought by the concept, a concern that earns him (and Horkheimer) Habermas's vitriolic and spiteful attacks,Footnote 69 the association is understandable but wrong and misleading.
In contrast to the Latin Western presentation and identification of the bans, it is important to underscore the fact that in their Hebrew form, the two prohibitions are against (1) making graven images and (2) bearing god's name in vain. That is, the first prohibition concerns the worship of idols, a worship that in that concrete historical context required human sacrifice; the second prohibition concerns bearing false witness or lying. It is not surprising, therefore, that for Maimonides, both in the case of graven images and in the case of divine names, the foremost concern is political rather than onto-theological. According to Maimonides, the purpose of the entire Torah and the raison d’être of all the commandments and prohibitions is the eradication of idolatry. That is why even though he devotes almost all of Guide 1 to the negation of all divine predicates and argues for their strictly equivocal nature, at the very end of the Guide, in the penultimate paragraph of Book 3, 54, Maimonides makes one concession to positive predication of the three major attributes characterizing divine action, namely, Hesed, Mishpat, u-Z'dakah, “Loving-kindness,” “Righteousness,” and “Judgment,” since these are actions worthy of imitation. Imitatio dei for Maimonides is thus strictly political. The reason for obedience to the law is the pursuit of justice rather than salvation. Or, happiness, understood as eudaimonia, can only come about in a just polity. The absence of “mercy,” a divine attribute central to the Christian understanding of the divinity, is thus worth noting; for mercy, properly speaking, is a violation of justice or the law. (Mercy is not equity, epieikeia.) The Jewish community is a political community rather than a community of believers.
In contrast to the association of the two prohibitions informed by the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition, precisely because it is a tradition of a political community, the prohibition against graven images is fundamentally linked to the anti-messianic prohibition against preparation for the messiah, that is, against the future orientation of history and politics and/or the future understanding of redemption. Understood in terms of concrete material history and politics, Adorno's strict adherence to the prohibition against “graven images” is formed and informed by his conversation with Benjamin about history and against Kant's and Hegel's teleologically oriented philosophy of history. Likewise, as will become evident in the following section, for Adorno, after Auschwitz, the prohibition against images, especially in a destitute world, must be read together with the prohibition against preparation for the messianic age, that is, against a future orientation of either theory or praxis, and must be given a stringent secular turn, stripped of any association with divine sanction, in fact belying it. Negative dialectics is thus a radical overturning (or overcoming) of theology, and in a significant way, especially of negative theology or Christian mysticism. This is precisely the sense in which negative dialectics can be understood as a secular Jewish species of negative theology. In this light, I wish to insist that the utopian moment in Adorno's thought can be understood only in terms of the political status and inseparability of these two prohibitions.
II. Adorno: Negative Dialectics as Inoculation against Idolatry
I see no other possibility than an extreme ascesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images, far beyond what this once originally meant.
What is, perhaps, most “infuriating” to traditional philosophy about Negative Dialectics is that, from beginning to end, its mode of flouting tradition, a mode characterized by Adorno as an “anti-system,” resists any attempt at unification as a method. From beginning to end Adorno provides different definitions or descriptions of negative dialectics, many of which are negative, that is, state and elaborate either what it is not conceptually or what it is opposed to concretely, objectively. Only at the end of the book, in the very last fragment of “Meditations on Metaphysics,” does Adorno provide something akin to a more comprehensive definition of negative dialectics that, perhaps, may account for the distinct ones scattered throughout the book.
That is not to say, however, that Negative Dialectics lacks rigor or consistency; on the contrary, it rigorously resists reduction or unification and abstract conceptualization and instead insists on the primacy of the object, the individual, the material or what cannot be subsumed by the concept, or, more precisely, what transcends it. This is the only transcendence recognized by Adorno. As a secular or Jewish form of negative theology, the only transcendence possible is “vulgar,” ontic, that is, concrete, material, historical, the inverse of the mystical, spiritual, ahistorical transcendence. While both forms of negative theology seek to transcend the concept, the secular (or Jewish) form returns thinking to bodies and suffering, to objective unfreedom, whereas the mystical, Christian one seeks to escape the latter through a flight out of politics and history and thereby, at best, trivializes suffering or becomes totally indifferent to it.
Negative Dialectics's strict adherence to the two “Jewish” bans is an expression of an historical materialism informed by and echoing Benjamin's thought, of which the most important for this chapter are the writings on Kafka and the “Theses on the Concept of History,” theses that begin with the power of occult wizened theology and end with the prohibition against preparation for the messianic age – here as the prohibition against inquiring into the future – and instead call for remembrance. This disenchants the future, according to Benjamin, or in the language of Dialectic of Enlightenment, breaks its spell, or in Negative Dialectics appears as the Disenchantment of the Concept.
The proximity to Benjamin is nowhere more evident than in Adorno's insistence on the unconceptual, the individual, the immersion in detail, in the disjecta of history or more precisely of historicism. Rather than abandon a concern for truth, against the necessary truth of historicism, both Benjamin and Adorno insist on the historical, and transitory, nature of truth. Benjamin's response to Gottfried Keller's claim that “the truth will not run away from us” is equally apt for Adorno, for it crystallizes the thoroughly historical nature of truth against historicism. Indeed, according to Benjamin, historical materialism pierces through historicism's timeless image. “For, it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image.”Footnote 70 Thus understood, the ban on images is a ban on images as timeless rather than a ban on name or word, provided that we insist on the gap between words and things, a gap marking the “history congealed in things.” Just as Benjamin's historical materialism pierces through historicism's timeless image, so does negative dialectics penetrate the hardened objects so as to expose in them possibility, “a possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one.”Footnote 71
Against a logical or epistemological understanding of possibility, Adorno, following Benjamin, situates it historically. Insofar as Negative Dialectics begins with the question of the possibility of philosophy, it posits philosophy as an “object” of historical inquiry, an “object” like any other object whose lost possibility negative dialectics seeks to penetrate. Indeed, it is in terms of lost possibility that Adorno frames the question of philosophy today. As the opening sentence of the introduction succinctly states, “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was lost.”Footnote 72 Viewed in this light, philosophy is an historical disjecta, either destitute or transformed beyond recognition into something use-full. Situated historically, the question of philosophy becomes a question of the relation between tradition and knowledge. And, according to Adorno, the mark of Modern philosophy, whose patriarchs are Descartes and Bacon, is to radically dehistoricize the contents of thought, to render it timeless, to transform the object into an immediate, that is, fully present, datum. Ironically, the “liberation of thought from history” originating in the insistence on the autonomy of inquiry against ecclesiastical-political authority which resulted in the rejection of all tradition as superstition reinstated superstition in a more insidious, because occult, manner. The pure presence of all creation to the divinity, the identity between presence and present that constituted eternity, has now been transposed into the enthralling “idol of a pure present.”Footnote 73 Thus, if Dialectics of Enlightenment critically traces the way in which “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology,”Footnote 74 Negative Dialectics critically traces the way in which Idolatry is already Modern science (scientia) and philosophy,Footnote 75 and Modern philosophy reverts back to idolatry. Against this form of idolatry, Adorno insists on the intratemporal nature of all thinking and on its mediation by tradition. Critique is immanent precisely insofar as tradition is what mediates between known objects. Lest the question of idolatry become abstract, Adorno succinctly but precisely presents the concrete historical specificity of the inseparable relation between subject and object, that is, forms of consciousness and objective material conditions.
A knowledge conforming to the idol of that purity, of total timelessness – a knowledge coincident with formal logic – would become a tautology; there would be no more room in it even for transcendental logic. Timelessness, the goal which the bourgeois mind may be pursuing in order to compensate for its own mortality, is the acme of its delusion.Footnote 76
It is also if not more totalitarian and authoritarian than was the medieval ecclesia against which it was first developed. Indeed, idolatry is an historical form, and hence the ban on images has to respond to its specific manifestation.
Recognizing the theologico-political origin and occult as well as distorted form of an ideal knowledge purportedly freed of tradition, Adorno recalls Benjamin's form of immersion in the details of tradition as a paradoxical critique of the autonomy of the subject. “Benjamin … strictly foreswore the ideal of autonomy and submitted his thought to tradition – although to a voluntary installed, subjectively chosen tradition that is as unauthoritative as it accuses the autarkic thought of being.”Footnote 77 Rather than abandon tradition as if that were possible through a transcendental leap, the critical relation to tradition transforms rather than escapes it. Philosophy's methexis in tradition, in the books that it criticizes, is transformative precisely because it is negative. It denies their authority rather than begrudges their importance. That is why, with Benjamin and Kafka, Adorno's model of the relation between philosophical books and their interpretation is exegesis rather than hermeneutics, originating as it does in the Jewish exegetical tradition, a tradition whose primary concern is transmissibility rather than truth or a tradition in which Haggadah can always raise a mighty paw against the Halakhah or a tradition that is nothing other than interpretation. The historical core of truth is its transmissibility. Indeed, as the Sages of the Talmud have stated, “Dibrah Torah Kilshon B'nei Adam,” or the Torah speaks human language, and elsewhere, “Shiveem Panim la-Torah,” or the Torah has seventy faces. Thus, although it may be possible to argue for a certain similarity between Halakhic interpretation and legal hermeneutics at the formal level, there is an abyss between exegesis of Hebrew Scripture and Christian biblical hermeneutics, whose Protestant origins are not only concomitant with philosophical Modernity but also are motivated by the same rejection of ecclesiastical authority. In an all too brief a word, hermeneutics is overtly or covertly anagogically or escathologically oriented. Indeed, Adorno's presentation of exegesis is “Jewish” or secular. After he establishes the commensurability between philosophy and tradition, Adorno states:
This justifies the move from philosophy to exegesis [Deutung], which exalts neither the interpretation nor the symbol into an absolute but seeks the truth where thinking secularizes the irretrievable archetypes of sacred texts.Footnote 78
Adorno links the hostility to tradition to the hostility to rhetoric and to any linguistic expression that is not strictly significative, that is, extrahistorical. If the focus of the discussion of the relation between philosophy and tradition was the concern with emptying of philosophy of mediation by the idols of positivistic science and pure presence, the concern of the discussion of rhetoric is the reduction of all meaning to signification, absolute precision, and, more important, the nominalist reduction of all meaning to signification in the name of demythologization, a reduction against which no rhetoric or dialectics can be mustered. Viewed in this light, Adorno's insistence on the historical core of truth is an intervention in the nominalist–realist debate, wrenching it free of Christology, or in its Hegelian form, restitution of conceptual realism. This is a critical intervention against doctrine. As Adorno states, “a genuine critical philosophy against nominalism is not invariant: it changes historically with the function of skepticism. To ascribe any fundamentum in re of concepts to the subject is idealism. Nominalism parted company with it only where idealism made objective claims. The concept of a Capitalist society is not a flatus vocis.”Footnote 79 At its best, critically or exegetically understood transmissibility is a matter of content rather than form; for, only as transmissible is truth not doctrine, the prohibition against thinking otherwise.
Against the philosophical hostility to rhetoric, which indeed can be usurped for merely practical, persuasive ends, Adorno argues not only that the rhetorical side of philosophy is dialectic but also, and more important, that “it is in the rhetorical quality that culture, society, and tradition animate the thought; a stern hostility to it is leagued with barbarism, in which bourgeois thinking ends.”Footnote 80 Against the tyranny of form mutual to Idealism and nominalism, Adorno proposes a dialectic that attempts to rescue the rhetorical element of philosophy, linking thought and its “object” through language, a link that philosophy either trivializes or disempowers, that is, depoliticizes. As Adorno argues, against popular opinion, or endoxa, the rhetorical element in dialectics inclines to content, precisely because content is not closed, that is, it is thoroughly historical and political. As a protest against form, dialectics is a protest against mythology, against the oppressive myth of the ever same, which properly, that is, materially understood, is a taboo against the concrete possibility that there could be a society without beggars. It is a protest against the promise of happiness in the midst of unhappiness. Against form, Adorno states, “To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia. It is this consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured. Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality; that is why it seems abstract in the midst of extant things.”Footnote 81 Negative dialectics brings into sharp relief the falsity insisted upon by an appeal to the necessity of what is presented as the unchangeable status of immediate reality, its eternal immutability. But, were there a right state of things, were there a society free of beggars, there would be no suffering and hence no need for utopia.
Adorno's writings on music, especially on Mahler and Schoenberg, confront the ban on images at its aesthetic core as well as underscores their Jewish form. Against the ahistorical edifying claims for both absolute music and modern music as expressions of the ever same,Footnote 82 new or avant-garde music deprives the hearers of the familiar, of consolation, repudiating the humanity of which they saw themselves as expressions, albeit in different ways, and thereby making manifest the inhumanity of the insistent claims to music's liberating ability in the midst of oppressive, totalizing institutions. The truth of avant-garde music resides in the absence of meaning, an absence that thereby repudiates the meaning of organized society. The doubled denial has no positive counterpart: in the current historical, political, material context, music is limited to determinate negation.Footnote 83 That Adorno describes the opposition to Mahler's and Schoenberg's music as expression of antisemitism as early as 1930 is worth noting.Footnote 84
Finally, one of the most vivid, distilled monadic constellations of protest against the persistent and insistent humanist claims of art, an aesthetic expression of negative dialectic, is found in “Toward Understanding Schoenberg.” After he notes that Schoenberg's music denies the listener everything to which she has been accustomed, that is, a link to the traditional, to image and consolation, Adorno states:
In an era of music's emancipation it claims to be nothing more than the voice of truth. Without crutches of the familiar, but also without the deception of praise and false positivity. The strength to do this, not illusion, is what is consoling about it. One could say that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music. This alienates us, where tone is concerned.Footnote 85
Art's relation to philosophy as a negative, radical Jewish or secular face (species) of negative theology is best summarized by the succinct claims that “[a]rt stand tensed in opposition to the horror of history” and that “it stands opposed to mythology” in Philosophy of New Music, the book described by Adorno as a third “detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment.”Footnote 86
