For a Negative Hermeneutics: Adorno,Gadamer and Critical Consciousness

Abstract

The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown’ between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. This state of affairs pleads for the (re-)elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. This paper studies the lessons that can be drawn in this regard from the intersection between, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of an historically adequate consciousness, and, on the other, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of the historically effected consciousness. The paper opens with a concise reconstruction of Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ as a critical response to instrumental rationality that borrows insights from radical historicism. The focus then shifts to Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which is read as a similar type of protest against instrumental reason that privileges dialogical forms of enculturation. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestive yet inconclusive reflections on some important elements of convergence/divergence between the two thinkers, notably, their theorisations of immanent and transcended critique, the role they ascribe to tradition and language vis-à-vis experience, and the special place of ‘mimesis’ in it. Overall, the argument is made that a ‘negative hermeneutics’ may be what is needed to fashion new interpretations of the world, to foster alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more aptly nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it.

“The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality”

– Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I ¹

“Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea – its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed – has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia”

“Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy that, if rightly read, will unfold a tale of infinite suffering. Without committing the fallacy of equating nature and reason, mankind must try to reconcile the two”

– Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason ²

The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown' between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. The evidence for this is plentiful. Absurd social-political and wealth discrepancies have, for quite a while now, been stoking an ambient malaise built on passive acquiescence, feelings of ressentiment and/or reactionary-authoritarian impulses that sap democratic ideals and values. The despoliation of the natural world and the disfigurement of the beings that live in it continue at a frantic pace, even though all the signs of a calamity in the making are there. The culture industry, ever more pervasive and densely woven, regiments people’s intellectual, sensorial and emotional horizons whilst robbing them of the fulfilment it purports to impart. Meanwhile, the return of bellicosity on the global geopolitical stage, the diffusion of a rhetoric that flouts any notion of the commons, or the persistence of unfair, prejudicial treatments on the basis of race, culture, gender… signal a drift towards (re)new(ed) forms of barbarism. This state of affairs pleads for the re-elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. The conditions, modalities and entailments of this type of consciousness have been examined in more detail elsewhere. ³ Suffice it to recall here its most salient features: the ability to be awakened to and meaningfully engaged in the events that interpellate and shape it into existence; a certain propensity to pursue ‘what would be different’ in the midst of the prohibitory sureties of social factuality and the apparent inevitabilities of the historical process; and lastly, a rational, resisting disposition vis-à-vis the distorting effects of regulated appearances through the preservation and cultivation of an open field for critical theorisation and rational transformative praxis. In a word, there is a pressing need nowadays for new interpretations of the world, for alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more appropriately nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it.

From this perspective, the intersection of, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of a historically adequate consciousness, and, on the other hand, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of an historically effected consciousness [das wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewußtsein] affords two valuable insights. For one thing, that a consciousness able to meet the social-historical exigencies of its time is predicated on the presence of a critical interpretative space that separates individual and/or collective actants from the entrenched milieux, narratives and patterns in and through which they live and think. For another, that this form of critical interpretation entails the articulation of cogent and incisive critical models that offer a glimpse, in light of what Adorno refers to as the ‘historical drive within the movement of things’, of what mis- or in-exists within the merely given [der bloßen Gegebenheit]. ⁴ This paper proposes to chart the train of thought that leads to these two insights and explore some of their most salient implications. In the process, it will highlight the ways in which each side accentuates the shortcomings of the other and suggest possible albeit inconclusive ways to address them. As this study unfolds, it will become apparent that the point at which Adorno’s and Gadamer’s thoughts coincide is also, in proper dialectical/dialogical form, a point of collision: the appreciation of the other, the nonidentical. Incidentally, this also happens to be the place where a critical consciousness in touch with the spirit of its time begins to take shape at every social-historical juncture.

Philosophical Interpretation, Instrumental Reason and Radical Historicism

In the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, Gadamer writes that his theoretical focus ‘was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’. ⁵ A decidedly critical and negative aura emanates from this pronouncement – and no sooner does Gadamer write these words than he portrays his philosophical gesture in historical, dialectical terms to boot:

[w]hat man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself. ⁶

Gadamer’s observation draws a salient parallel with Adorno’s pronouncement, uttered during his 1965–1966 lectures on negative dialectics, that

it is not possible to think right unless one wills the right thing [to happen]; that is to say, unless, underlying this thought, and providing it with a truly animating power, there is the desire that it should be right for human beings to enter a condition in which meaningless suffering should come to an end and in which – I can only express it negatively – the spell hanging over mankind should be lifted. ⁷

Interestingly, Adorno had already embraced this theoretical attitude as early as 1931, when, in his inaugural lecture as a Privatdozent at the University of Frankfurt, titled ‘The actuality of philosophy’, he outlined a scholarly programme – which, a few decades later, would culminate in the theory of negative dialectics and his seminal book of the same name – under the rubric of philosophical interpretation. The latter, Adorno explains, is not a mere pursuit of ‘a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question’, nor a ‘search for concealed and manifest intentions of reality’, but rather, an enquiry into ‘unintentional reality’ by means of trial combinations, or, as it were, constellations of ‘isolated elements of reality’. ⁸ Crucially, Adorno articulates his theory of philosophical interpretation in terms that recall Gadamer’s juxtaposition of ‘truth’ and ‘method’. This is the closest Adorno comes to a definition of philosophical interpretation:

philosophy persistently and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings. The history of philosophy is nothing other than the history of such entwinings. Thus it reaches so few “results”. It must always begin anew and therefore cannot do without the least thread which earlier times have spun, and through which the lineature is perhaps completed which could transform the ciphers into a text. ⁹

Notice here how Adorno places special emphasis on (i) the fact that philosophy is an open interpretative gesture that aims at truth yet can never possess it in its entirety; (ii) how philosophy is the intellectual moment of the actual experience of an event that manifests itself both as a riddling alterity and an inviting interlocutor, and whose effects reverberate throughout and sow the seeds of history; (iii) finally, how any appreciation of the vicissitudes of existing reality is, always already, interwoven with that ‘least thread that earlier times have sprung’, and how it is precisely as consummated pasts veer into possible futures that still images turn into legible, eloquent scripts. ¹⁰ What is more, Adorno draws a marked distinction between ‘science’, which he takes to mean both the systematic enquiry into the fabric and behaviour of the physical and natural world by virtue of observation and experiment, and the systemically organised body of knowledge that results from it, on the one hand, and philosophical interpretation, on the other. Philosophy-qua-interpretation, he contends, is meant to ‘light up the riddle-Gestalt [occasioned by science] like lightning and to negate it (aufzuheben), not to persist behind the riddle and imitate it’, or, in other words, to ‘negat[e] (aufhebt) questions, the exact articulation of which is the task of science’. ¹¹

These considerations should in no way be read as discrediting scientific progress per se. For, a purely anti-scientific attitude in the domain of intellectual experience would be deemed by Adorno, and indeed all the other members of the Frankfurt School, to be acutely reactionary. That having been said, Adorno does take issue with a particular theoretical outlook that places all experience – whether actual or possible, whether it relates to natural or social-historical reality – firmly within the bounds of scientific methodology, technique and know-ability/ledge, known as ‘scientism’. It is this latter that constitutes the primary target of Horkheimer and Adorno’s formative treatment of the aporias of Enlightenment rationality. One reads therefore in Dialectic of Enlightenment that the scientific disposition that emerged with modernity evolved into a Weltanschauung that allows no movement of thought away ‘from the business of manipulating the actual’. ¹² Enlightenment-qua-scientism, the two theorists elaborate,

stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. ¹³

It is not only natural objects that make up this substrate of domination; human subjects are pulled into it as well inasmuch as they too form part of the natural world. Humanity’s blind mastery over nature by dint of its instrumentalisation, Horkheimer and Adorno then conclude, is also already its self-subjugation and estrangement from itself. ¹⁴ This pattern, the two theorists assert, is particularly harmful to the human capacity for experience, as it leads to a state of affairs in which, thought ossifies into ‘an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine’, whilst people are more and more reduced ‘to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them’. ¹⁵ Adorno sets up his theory of philosophical interpretation as a counterpoise to this paradigm, and he accomplishes this through the refusal to subordinate philosophy to science/scientism, be it as its historical precursor or its current doctrinal addendum. ¹⁶ In fact, he discerns an essential nuance of difference between the two outlooks: where science, across all its respective fields, treats its outcomes as, in Adorno’s words, ‘indestructible and static’, philosophy, for its part, views even ‘the first finding which it lights upon as a sign that needs unriddling’. ¹⁷ This way of seeing things propels philosophy into something like a ‘generalised negative semiology’. Negative, in that, for Adorno, unravelling the sign does not operate via the application of pre-established schemata and rules, but hinges instead on what he calls an ‘open intellectual experience’; it is a figure of subtraction, an un-riddling as against a mere resolution. ¹⁸ Generalised (or generic), because the signs that philosophy labours to decipher are not bound to just one language, which is also to say, no single existing repertoire of signs takes precedence.

It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that Adorno makes a point of stressing that philosophical interpretation is by no means concerned with the ‘problem of “meaning”’. ¹⁹ What is at stake for it, is neither the valorisation of the meaning/s that inhere/s within reality as it already exists, and thereby the consolidation of this latter, nor the revelation, by way of a dissection of appearances, of a parallel, genuine world that lies hidden beneath the actual one. ²⁰ That would amount to an apologetic of the merely given, or, worse still, a rehashing of antiquated, defunct metaphysics. Adorno has good reasons to reject such affirmative conceptions of meaning. To be sure, he is quite keen to anchor intellectual experience to the concrete reality of human social-historical becoming; and, as will be seen below, he is persuaded that critical theoretical reflection on the real must have regard not just for the particular but also for human experience taken as a whole, as structure. For all that, however, Adorno rejects the notion that the real as a whole lends itself to be fully reflected in/by the unity of consciousness. That would entail that spirit has the ability to one-sidedly and irrevocably solve any and all antinomies that arise in experience, and by that token that what lends itself to contemplation, even if only by means of some spurious artifice, is also in itself rational. For Adorno, not only does this positivism leave humanity with far too little, in that it obscures contradictions behind the shroud of normalisation, but the actual experiential substance of late capitalist reality quite simply refutes it. In his words,

only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality […] The fullness of the real, as totality, does not let itself be subsumed under the idea of being which might allocate meaning to it; nor can the idea of existing being be built up out of elements of reality. ²¹

Importantly, this is Adorno thinking before the Shoah. This is him after:

Experience forbids the resolution in the unity of consciousness of whatever appears contradictory […] contradiction cannot be brought under any unity without manipulation, without the insertion of some wretched cover concepts that will make the crucial differences vanish […] The aporetical concepts of philosophy are marks of what is objectively, not just cogitatively, unresolved. ²²

The unfaltering character of Adorno’s thought over such a long period of time is striking. Just as remarkable is his abiding belief that philosophical interpretation and transformative praxis are closely interwoven. This latter aspect follows from and attests to Adorno’s adherence, in some measure at least, to absolute/radical historicism and the philosophy of praxis. ²³ Put briefly, this theory holds that there are no ways of thinking about, of being and doing in the world that carry meaning outside the social-historical environments whence they emanate and within which they find expression. ²⁴ Which is to say, every given social-historical state of affairs is intricately woven out of a range of practices that bring it into being and uphold it, and the various theoretical apparatuses deployed to make sense of and legitimise it. For the philosophy of praxis, these elements are so tightly entwined that antinomies in theory, such as the philosophical dualism between subject and object, or the ethical distinction between norms and facts, are treated by it as little more than the abstract reflections, or symptoms of real antitheses rooted in the historically sedimented, palpable actuality of the established social, political and cultural order. ²⁵ Likewise, these inconsistencies cannot be remedied purely and simply in or by theory, but their unwinding always already implies the practical transformation of the state of affairs that generated and perpetuates them at any given moment of humanity’s historical becoming. In light of these considerations, the following passage from Adorno’s 1931 lecture gains special resonance:

The interpretation of given reality and its abolition are connected to each other, not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its [reality’s] real change always follows promptly […] Only in the annihilation of the question [i.e., arising social-theoretical antinomies] is the authenticity of philosophic interpretation first successfully proven, and mere thought by itself cannot accomplish this [authenticity]: therefore the annihilation of the question compels praxis. ²⁶

Adorno retained his fidelity to this idea, even though the timbre of his thought turned more ruminative and melancholy with the passage of time. His famous asseveration, committed to paper some 35 years after his nomination as Privatdozent, bears eloquent testimony to this: ‘[p]hilosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’. ²⁷

Philosophical interpretation is not strictly speaking an antagonist to scientific reason, even if it expressly rejects all manner of scientistic reductions. ²⁸ Rather, it is an expression of that (self-)critical, reflexive moment of experience that refines the established savoir, the corpus of factual knowledge, by reinscribing questions formulated and/or discoveries realised by science in the abstract back into the concrete situations from which they arise. In this way, philosophical interpretation brings to the fore all that science and its attendant structures of cognition leave out. Adorno labels this approach as an exact fantasy, that is to say,

fantasy which abides strictly within the material which the sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects, granted, which fantasy itself must originally generate […] the demand to answer the questions of a pre-given reality each time, through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of which has its control in the disappearance of the question. ²⁹

Interestingly, Adorno articulates his theory of interpretation in terms of a ‘circumference of elements’, a material horizon, so to speak, within which, thought that focuses on ‘relations with the object, and not at validity isolated in itself’, is to find ways to let the other relative to the established structures of experience speak for itself. ³⁰ But if thought is limited by such a material horizon, which, as Adorno explains, cannot be outstripped by sheer fiat, is it not destined to repeat what is already the case? Not really. Adorno’s thesis entails what one might call a sublimation-from-within, an immanent transcendence. ³¹ The ‘annihilation of the question’, the true transformation of reality – it is the same thing here – is not conditional on the thaumaturgic advent of some ‘other’ from beyond, for, this ‘other’ always already in/exists within established social-historical formations. Quite simply, it all has to do with the fact that the composition of the prevalent state of affairs at a particular social-historical juncture may be such that one or more of its constituent parts – be it specific segments of society, ideas, theories, and their practical implications, prospects of solidarity and justice, and so on – become obfuscated. The point is to persistently reimagine the real by means of an exact fantasy that brings together seemingly unrelated thoughts, objects and practices in a tentative, ludic manner that allows them to interact in unconventional albeit rational ways, so that, in the process, new perspectives and critical models are fashioned that bring to light aspects of experience that had hitherto remained unseen, silent, unintelligible. ³²

Of course, there remains the issue of whether philosophical interpretation, which clearly pertains to the province of intellectual experience, can have any meaningful effect on the concrete, material fabric of the world. One possible way to address this point would be to hold, with Adorno, that all thought is always also a sort of practice, even in its most narrowly logical guises. For, each original theoretical composition brings about a rearrangement in the way reality is encountered and enacted; every decision taken to combine two previously separate and distinct ideas is as such work. Hence, the problem of whether one ought to interpret the world or change it only appears as a dilemma in the narrow perspective of pragmatic exigencies, for, on the whole, one always already entails the other. As Adorno would have it, ‘once thinking sets out in its purest form to bring about change in even the smallest thing, no power on earth can separate theory from practice in an absolute way’. ³³

Philosophical Hermeneutics, Culture and Dialectics

In his seminal essay of 1959, ‘Theory of pseudo-culture’, Adorno argues that, in early modernity, culture [qua Bildung] was regarded as a – if not, the – central attribute of the ‘free individual […] grounded in his own consciousness’, and able to sublimate, in a dialogical relationship with the ambient social-historical and natural realities, ‘his instincts purely as his own spirit’; so that, it would be reasonable to think that, ‘the more enlightened the individual, the enlightened society as a whole’. ³⁴ However, as modernity entered its late stage, following its classical period, the once incontrovertible ‘relation of culture to an anticipated [emancipatory] praxis’ became moot, ‘it appeared to sink’, as Adorno puts it, ‘to an heteronomous level, to become a means of safeguarding advantages in view of the unstratified bellum omnus contra omnes’. ³⁵ This means that the reification of human experience is not limited, for Adorno, to scientism only, but also takes the form of pseudo-culture [Halbbildung, ημιμáθεια], that is to say, a type of culture-in-stasis that hegemonises and reflects the dull stratified structure of life in late capitalist reality. While scientism places limits on what can be known and how this knowledge is obtained, pseudo-culture institutes and systematises particular ‘distributions of the sensible’ – to reprise Jacques Rancière’s expression here –, namely, ways in which this what and this how are organised, and the types of human relations that flow from them. ³⁶ Think, by way of example, of the split between manual and intellectual labour, the difference between skilled and unskilled workers, or recently, the divide between ‘laymen’ and ‘experts’, the so-called ‘deplorables’ and the ‘elites’, or again the whole debacle regarding the prestige and influence attached to educational institutions, journals, publishers, or (pe-)degrees of varying ‘rank(ing)s’. ³⁷ As scientism and pseudo-culture, two of the most corrosive guises of instrumental rationality, take hold, barriers are erected that fetter the dialogical interplay between subject and object, as much as subject and subject, and as a result greatly diminish the ambit and import of critical, dialectical experience. At about the same time, that Adorno formulates these thoughts, Gadamer sets up the notion of culture-qua-Bildung as the kernel of his philosophical hermeneutics. The leitmotif is hardly different. ‘Bildung is intimately associated with the idea of culture’, Gadamer explains in Truth and Method, ‘and designates primarily the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities’. ³⁸ As one shrewd commentator observes, Bildung figures so prominently in philosophical hermeneutics because it represents, for the celebrated hermeneuticist, the ‘historically formed but metaphysically contingent ground upon which the possibility of understanding rests’. ³⁹ Pondering the purview of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer writes in a way that substantiates this reading:

Philosophical hermeneutics takes as its task the opening up of the hermeneutical dimension in its full scope, showing its fundamental significance for our entire understanding of the world and thus for all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself: from interhuman communication to manipulation of society; from personal experience by the individual in society to the way in which he encounters society; and from the tradition as it is built of religion and law, art and philosophy, to the revolutionary consciousness that unhinges the tradition through emancipatory reflection. ⁴⁰

For Gadamer, cultural formation (Bildung), and with it philosophical hermeneutics, has little to do with the elaboration and inculcation of expedient solutions to pre-formed riddles. Quite the opposite, its main task is to foster that diacritical idiosyncrasy and tact that make it possible to discern, through the thick veil of ingrained practices and ways of thinking, the intermittent, unexpected relationships and interplay between different aspects of reality.

Gadamer construes Bildung as an alternative paradigm of experience to the techno-scientific discourse that assumed hegemonic status in modern times, especially in late capitalist reality. Here, ‘techno-scientific discourse’ is just another name for ‘scientism’: a Weltanschauung premised on the blind equation of truth with abstraction, quantitative measurability, reproducibility, mastery over the content. Like Adorno’s philosophical interpretation, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is not naïvely anti-scientific. As a matter of fact, Gadamer is a fervent advocate of science qua the dialectical, polyvalent, reality-based quest for knowledge (i.e. Wissenschaft, γνῶσις/ἐπίγνωσις). ⁴¹ This last, narrows down neither to ‘theoretical consciousness’, or ἐπιστήμη, and its endeavours to ascertain what things are, nor to ‘technical proficiency’, or τἐχνη, and its regard for how things are built and operate. Gadamer’s encyclopaedic experience is rather inspired by the Aristotelian idea of ‘practical wisdom’ or φρόνησῐς, which, though informed by theoretical consciousness and technical expertise, seeks answers to the riddles that emerge from/in particular situations in light of the sedimented intellect and sensibility of human social-historical and cultural becoming. ⁴² Having said that, when Gadamer talks about practical wisdom it is not to advocate some kind of vitalism or other, but to press for a more holistic account of human experience, one in which the so-called ‘positive’ sciences are just one possible path (ὁδός) to truth amidst others, notably, art, history, culture. ⁴³ To be sure, Gadamer is willing to affirm, somewhat in line with Horkheimer, Adorno or Marcuse, that the supposedly ‘neutral’, ‘unbiased’ techno-scientific knowledge is always already mediated by the social-historical and aesthetic-cultural milieux within which it is articulated. ⁴⁴ It is in this context that Gadamer’s theorisation of prejudice – which here means something like ‘sedimented experiential insight’ – must be read as a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘negative’ prejudice, which he assimilates to ‘the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment’, meaning, a ‘prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power’; and, on the other, ‘positive’ prejudice, that is to say, the historically effected consciousness [das wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewußtsein] that possibilises the (self-)critical understanding and awareness of one’s tradition, one’s horizon or ‘range of vision’ that delimits the inner and outer, the mundane and the eerie, the felt and the unfelt, the known and the unknown. ⁴⁵ Gadamer’s approach to the notion of prejudice echoes Horkheimer and Adorno’s problematisation of the Enlightenment-qua-scientism. Witness, for instance, the following fragment from Dialectic of Enlightenment:

For the scientific temper […] any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender. ⁴⁶

Of course, Gadamer’s take on tradition, horizon, or what the two critical theorists call here the ‘magic circle’, is not as inimical as theirs – in fact, it is rather favourable. One can read, thus, in Truth and Method that ‘we are always situated within traditions’, and that ‘[o]ur historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard’, voices that make up ‘the tradition in which we want to share and have a part’. ⁴⁷ Naturally, the Enlightenment is one such tradition, yet in setting itself up as the unalloyed other of tradition-qua-prejudice, it severs itself from existing social-historical and cultural reality by erecting the dense, impenetrable walls of pure, methodological, abstract(ing) reason, and so becomes an absolute in itself. As a result, Gadamer explains, Enlightenment rationality misses the fact that what appears to it to be a ‘limiting prejudice […] in fact belongs to historical reality itself’, so much so that any proper appreciation of humankind’s ‘finite, historical mode of being’ requires the recognition of prejudices and their impact on experience. ⁴⁸ ‘We can approach this question’, Gadamer elaborates, ‘by taking the Enlightenment’s critical theory of prejudices […] and giving it a positive value’, so as to protect its most vital insight, namely, that only the ‘methodologically disciplined use of reason can safeguard us from all error’, against any drift towards dogmatic techno-scientism. ⁴⁹ Although, as will be seen later on, Gadamer and Adorno hold starkly different views on the ambit and role of tradition and prejudice vis-à-vis experience, the hermeneuticist and the critical theorist reach common ground in their critical assessment of Enlightenment rationality gone mad scientism:

To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning – this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned [in the context of scientistic reason]. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. ⁵⁰

Philosophical hermeneutics is set to the rhythm of the dialectics of finitude and infinity. That much is evident from Gadamer’s dislike for all types of closed, unreceptive accounts of experience. Hence, he affirms, for instance, in agreement with Hegel, that a ‘true method’ is ‘an action of the thing itself’ – Adorno’s idea of the priority of the object springs immediately to mind here. ⁵¹ This means that the subject is not the be-all and end-all of experience, but that there is another aspect to it that is just as important, if not more so: the object, the matter at hand, die Sache. With Gadamer, experience becomes a movement, a gesture, a doing which does not ‘interfer[e] arbitrarily – latching onto this or that ready-made notion as it strikes one – with the immanent necessity of the thought’ but unravels ‘what consistently follows from the subject matter itself' while ‘insist[ing] on the logic of the thought'. ⁵² What Gadamer opposes, thus, is not the disciplined and careful effort to draw closer to objects, but the undue reliance in a pre-established system of coordinates that professes to have a grip on all and any object, but which in fact only arbitrarily manipulates them until, to paraphrase Adorno, they end up looking the way it wants them to. ⁵³ Against system(at)ic philosophising, which squashes an abundant, pluralistic reality into a narrow set of axioms, rules and principles, Gadamer issues a call for a mode of being in and thinking about reality that is permanently open to all that is at odds with it, and this precisely because it is aware of its limits, and therefore of the fact that there is something beyond them that is equally, if not more, elaborate than what lies within. In this respect, Gadamer is very much in agreement with the Adornian idea that ‘the entire trick with philosophy would be to learn how to philosophize in an open way without becoming mollusc-like’, or, to put it differently, to think the object in a non-arbitrary way that ‘follow[s] its inner necessity while at the same time pursuing an objective compulsion’. ⁵⁴ Adorno makes use of a rich array of terms (e.g. ‘undiminished experience’, ‘cognitive utopia’, ‘determinate negation’, or of course, ‘negative dialectics’), to denote this kind of sensibility to the non-identical; Gadamer, for his part, thinks it under the rubric of the ‘fusion of horizons’. ⁵⁵ But, while Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics is geared towards a prospective im/possible state of redemption, for the sake of which it strives to forge perspectives ‘that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear 1 day in the messianic light’, Gadamer points his gaze towards the past, to history. ⁵⁶ ‘Every encounter with tradition’, Gadamer writes, ‘takes place within historical consciousness’ and entails an exposure to and appreciation of ‘a tension between the text [or, indeed, the object] and the present’. ⁵⁷ Gadamer wishes to lay emphasis on that minimal differentiation between reality as a form determined by the past, and reality as its actual, exuberant, social-historical content. This is how he puts it:

The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out. This is why it is part of the hermeneutic approach to project a historical horizon that is different from the horizon of the present. Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness and hence foregrounds the horizon of the past from its own. On the other hand, it is itself […] only something superimposed upon continuing tradition, and hence it immediately recombines with what it has foregrounded itself from in order to become one with itself again in the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires. ⁵⁸

A difference in perspective begins to take shape here. What Adorno takes apart in a bid to clear the path to a future condition of ‘the many as no longer inimical’, Gadamer pulls back together, so to speak, to allow for the formation of a more nuanced, more refined historical consciousness in the now. ⁵⁹

Between Immanence and Transcendence

Before taking a closer look at how their positions differ, it is worth noting here that both Adorno and Gadamer are intent on unveiling, each in their own way, the dialectical nuances of experience that lie hidden behind the fabric of regulated appearances: to the hollow abstractions of idealism, they oppose the materiality of objects/texts; to the ahistorical layouts of the real, they affirm their historical implications and origins; to the uniformity and constancy of identity-thinking/meaning, they counterpose the abounding multifacetedness of being. Whether under the rubric of the ‘priority of the object’ or that of the ‘fusion of horizons’, the two philosophers concur that experiential cultural formation (Bildung) hinges on the encounter with alterity, with history, with transcendence from within – which is also to say, immanent to – the conventional ways of doing and thinking, and, by the same token, on an acute awareness of the latter’s incompleteness, or indeed falsity. There is a certain meta dimension to all this – a meta-negative one, to be more precise. The sort of experience that Adorno and Gadamer relate to interpretation/hermeneutics has little to do with such inflationary, affirmative processes as the blithe accumulation of facts, the scholastic taxonomy of what is, or the normative prescription of what ought to be done. What they propose is far more subtractive and indeed critical in the classic idealist meaning of the term. This becomes abundantly clear in a key passage of Truth and Method, where Gadamer is concerned. ‘All self-knowledge’, he writes,

arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it. ⁶⁰

A similar motif can be found in Adorno’s theorisation of the immanently transcendent nature of social-cultural criticism. Witness, for example, the following passage from a seminal essay he penned in 1949 and published in 1951:

the task of criticism must be not so much to search for the particular interest groups to which cultural phenomena are to be assigned, but rather to decipher the general social tendencies which are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful interests realize themselves. ⁶¹

The operative word here is ‘tendencies’. For Adorno, tendency [Tendenz] signals, in typical negative dialectic fashion, ‘the ability of theoretical thought to grasp the non-identical quality of a concept within the concept itself’. ⁶² This formulation reprises that earlier Adornian motif for which philosophy-qua-interpretation should bring into relief unintentional reality through constellations of discrete elements of reality. Hence, rather than interpreting experience as a series of siloed operational functions, critical theory should rather reach out, Adorno believes, for ‘something qualitatively different’, namely, the whole as the ‘vanishing point’ that determines it. ⁶³ For this, neither the invocation of the Zeitgeist – as in Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit – nor the bare aggregation of immediate phenomena suffice. For, the whole, this vibrant, intricately woven reality whose only constant is its variegation, is in essence contradiction, fugue becoming. It follows that any attempt to think reality as a totality is soon driven to dialectics, in that any fragment of truth it may hope to arrive at resides not in the universal or the particular, the one or the many, the subject or the object, the (pre)given or the emergent, etc., but in the differential aperture that at once separates and unites them; a space generated by, to reprise Adorno, the fact that things refuse to go into their concept without leaving a remainder. ⁶⁴

This point is clearly illustrated by Adorno’s assertion that ‘[t]he dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate’. ⁶⁵ In keeping with Hegel, Adorno construes culture as both the theatre and the concretisation of (late) modernity’s core antinomy, namely, that between subjective spirit and empirical reality. Indeed, this very disparity, he believes in the vein of Hegelian thought, is at the origin of culture to begin with. ⁶⁶ In this perspective, ‘culture’ refers to the practical processes and conceptual apparatus with which humanity invests reality, in other words, the set of ways of doing and modes of thinking in and about the world it deploys to make sense of and control it. But, the veracity of culture is also its lie: practices and beliefs that may seem normal or true at one point of humanity’s social-historical becoming will often reveal their perversity or falsity at another (e.g. slavery), and vice versa (e.g. heliocentrism). This does not mean that culture is false in and of itself, but that it becomes so when it is treated as a constant rather than a process. As a closed system of entrenched performances and precepts, culture omits many dimensions of the real, and fails to do justice to it as becoming that perpetually unveils new aspects of what is, new possibilities of what could be. Herein lies the paradox: the lacunae of culture only become apparent to those who are imbued with it, as one must be able to appreciate its semiotic order to sense disorder, but to perceive them as such means that one is always already situated outside culture, for, some critical distance is required to chart culture as a whole and detect the truths that hollow it out. The Adornian dialectical critic of culture inhabits both positions, which allows her to embody ‘[t]he mind which sees that reality does not resemble it in every respect but is instead subject to an unconscious and fatal dynamic’ and as a result finds itself ‘impelled even against its will beyond apologetics’. ⁶⁷ A sort of feedback loop is at work here: the awakening to and critique of the disparity between spirit and reality implicit in culture is always already culture itself – it basically means the cultivation of new, alternative modes of being in and thinking about the world, sometimes more, others less refined than their precursors, yet always amenable to scrutiny in their turn. The negative is, here, the measure of truth. The more spirit opens itself up to the objective side of (cultural) experience, what Adorno terms, in typical Marxist parlance, its ‘material basis’ as distinct from its ‘pure principle’, the more generic the discourse it pronounces (i.e. the more inclusive its address), the greater the truth and substance of its understanding of reality. If this ‘more’ is in fact negative, it is because it designates, not the mere inflow of new elements into the old, but indeed a subtraction from, a break with patterns of existence that blot out any awareness of the ‘altogether other [das ganz Andere]’. To reprise Adorno, it is in the midst of profound disenchantment that spirit senses ‘naked existence in its nakedness and delivers it up to criticism’; it is also through this operation that spirit acquires a self-reflective quality, in that, its critical gesture is always already ‘the object of permanent criticism, both in its general presuppositions – its immanence in the existing society – and in its concrete judgments’. ⁶⁸

Gadamer’s approach to the ‘hermeneutic circle’ exhibits some traits of parity with Adorno’s understanding of the dialectical critique of culture, albeit the tenor of his theorising is somewhat more restrained when it comes to its social-political implications. The term ‘hermeneutic circle’ refers to the idea that all interpretation – or comprehension, it is the same thing here – involves an iterative movement from the text (the subject matter, die Sache) taken as a whole, as a framing totality, to the individual parts that compose it, and back again. In this light, the interpretative act proves to be a transformative experience in its own right. That is because, in the process of interpreting a text – and ‘text’ it to be understood here in a broad sense – the completeness that underlies its meaning clashes with the aleatory incongruity of its individual elements. Whether one is dealing with cultural, social-political, scientific or other texts, the interpretative process is intermittently disrupted by parallax-causing singularities that distort and alter the overall structure of meaning that governs it. In its turn, impacted and emended, the texture of reality casts new light on its parts. These singularities in/exist in and for the text prior to being encountered; and this encounter is an overdetermined event that bursts forth from the bas-fonds of the historical, experiential real. ‘Not just occasionally but always’, Gadamer writes,

the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well […] fresh sources of error [are] constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. ⁶⁹

Apart from the fact that this dispositif marks the junction between philosophical hermeneutics and Bildung, it also reveals the presence of something like a critique of ideology in Gadamer. ⁷⁰ This negative, dialectical quality manifests itself most prominently in a pivotal passage of Truth and Method in which the eminent hermeneutist elaborates on one of the most basic elements of his thought, that is, tradition. There, Gadamer posits tradition as the “commonality”, the objective “ur-frame” that directs human understanding. ⁷¹ But in the same breath, he historicises and dialecticises it. Tradition, he explains, ‘is not simply a permanent precondition’, quite the opposite; it is ever woven, unravelled, and then woven anew in the course of a dialogue with the subject, for, in the end, and however diversely, anyone is δυνητικά, if not εν ενεργεία, poised to ‘understand, participate in the evolution of [a cultural, social-political, scientific or other] tradition, and hence further determine it [them]selves’. ⁷² However, for Gadamer, tradition is also affected on the side of the object. Every text, he claims, seems at first to be transparent, in possession of a ‘unity of meaning’ that renders any interpretation of it superfluous; it is only when this ‘fore-conception of completeness’ is shaken by the realisation that one or several elements proper to the text depart from this meaning that the need for interpretation really makes itself felt. ‘The fore-conception of completeness that guides all our understanding’, Gadamer concludes, ‘is always determined by the specific content’. ⁷³ It follows from this that the hermeneutic circle is irreducible to either the subject or the object, the interpreter or the text alone, but rather refers to their reciprocal interpellation; in the same vein, ‘tradition’, as Gadamer understands it, is nothing more than the residue of this experiential flow, the record of its past intersections as much as the negative condition – ‘negative’ in that it circumscribes the field of effective experience and is by that token what any new emergence must transgress – of its future unfolding. ‘The true locus of hermeneutics’, Gadamer asserts, ‘is this in-between’, namely, ‘the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition’. ⁷⁴

For a Negative Hermeneutics

Three intriguing and, as it happens, sequential sections of Negative Dialectics cut straight to the heart of the problematics at play here, and highlight some riveting fault lines between Adorno and Gadamer. Their titles alone speak volumes as to their purport: ‘Thing, Language, History’, ‘Tradition and Knowledge’, and ‘Rhetoric’. There, Adorno explains that the sharpest conceptual device at the disposal of the theory of negative dialectics is ‘possibility’, that element in things or actors that makes them other than that which the schemata and roles assigned to them by the dominant social, political, cultural, or scientific orders limit them to. ⁷⁵ In this perspective, possibility carries a doubly negative meaning: for one thing, it signals that things are ‘so and not otherwise’, singularities that throw into disarray the ideal abstractions that pure reason imputes to them; for another, it denotes that things are precisely not just ‘so and not otherwise’, but that they ‘have come to be under certain conditions’, conditions that are to be brought to consciousness to read ‘things in being […] as a text of their becoming’. ⁷⁶ Adorno then turns his critical gaze towards language:

no matter how hard we try for linguistic expression of such a history congealed in things, the words we use will remain concepts. Their precision substitutes for the thing itself, without quite bringing its selfhood to mind; there is a gap between words and the thing they conjure. Hence, the residue of arbitrariness and relativity in the choice of words as well as in the presentation as a whole. ⁷⁷

A rift appears to form here between Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics and Gadamer’s ‘linguistic ontology’. While the former attaches paramount importance to the disparity between subject and object, concept and thing, universal and particular, which it takes to be inevitable albeit not per se irreconcilable, the latter erases this same difference by proclaiming that ‘Being that can be understood is language’. ⁷⁸ In saying this, Gadamer seems to propose that language possesses the power to call into being all that already is or could be, which in turn entails that there is nothing – at least, nothing of meaning – outside language, thereby espousing a perspective in which the latter acts as a Ur-Subject that constitutes reality over and above the subtleties of the object and the exertions of the (particular) subject of interpretation. ⁷⁹ The onto-epistemological corollaries of this thesis are fairly simple to follow: what is and what can be known are ultimately structured and attainable by/in language, a condition that results in the preclusion of that part of reality that eludes the word, what ever since Kant has been known as the ‘thing-in-itself’, and after Hegel, and notably Adorno, the ‘nonidentical’. ⁸⁰ The worry here is not about whether philosophical hermeneutics takes notice of the ‘other’ or not – it most certainly does –, but rather, as Habermas and Derrida have aptly shown, that for it, the condition for the appreciation of the ‘other’ is its subsumption under an already established savoir – the stipulation that the ‘other’ be identified as such within the ambit of the ‘same’, be it a given tradition or a projected consensus. ⁸¹

In point of fact, Gadamer and Adorno share some common ground on the intricate question of the nexus between tradition, knowledge and language. For one thing, Adorno believes, as does Gadamer, that ‘thought is the internalization of history’. ⁸² As a determined movement evolving in time, or as it were, as intellectual Bildung, thought, the critical theorist contends, is at the micro level what social-historical progress means for the grand order of things. And just as there can be no earthly durée without temporal events – that is, without actual things and their entanglements in time – thought’s immanent historicity cannot be purely formal either. To the contrary, it is contingent on its material substrate, namely, the multiple trails that punctuate its unfolding. ⁸³ This is the crux of Adorno’s assimilation of dialectics to ‘language as the organon of thought’: to establish dialectics as the spirited mise en oeuvre of the ‘rhetorical element’ implicit in the act of reflection that pursues a rapprochement – albeit without rendering them identical – ‘of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades’. ⁸⁴ Along the same lines, and this is a further point of comparison, Gadamer evokes the ‘perfect word’ qua the consummate ‘reflection of the thing’, the locution that instantiates the ‘path of the thought to which alone […] it owes its existence’. ⁸⁵ Gadamer then addresses, in terms that are highly relevant to a critical theoretical perspective, a timely preoccupation: the more words are reduced to tokens – Adorno would say pure, timeless ‘idols’ – that only reference things in lieu of naming them in their full particularity, the more they become, at best, plain tautologies, at worst, the bare apparatus of an instrumental rapport to reality. ⁸⁶ This insight follows logically from Gadamer’s theorisation of experience as a negative, open engagement with the world. As he explains,

experience is initially always experience of negation: something is not what we supposed it to be. In view of the experience that we have of another object, both things change – our knowledge and its object. We know better now, and that means that the object itself “does not pass the test.” The new object contains the truth about the old one […] The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself. ⁸⁷

Adorno would most likely approve of Gadamer’s (negative) dialectical portrayal of experience. ⁸⁸ Even so, matters become more problematic the moment the hermeneuticist brings tradition into the picture. ‘Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition’, Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, and adds, so as to allay any misapprehensions, ‘[t]his is what is to be experienced’. ⁸⁹ He then proceeds to make a crucial point: ‘tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language’. ⁹⁰ Now, compare this with the following fragment from Negative Dialectics:

philosophy’s methexis in tradition would only be a definite denial of tradition. Philosophy rests on the texts it criticizes. They are brought to it by the tradition they embody, and it is in dealing with them that the conduct of philosophy becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the move from philosophy to exegesis, which exalts neither the interpretation nor the symbol into an absolute but seeks the truth where thinking secularizes the irretrievable archetype of sacred texts. ⁹¹

For all the negative and open disposition of Gadamer’s thought, there is in it something like an ontological closure of tradition, in that tradition is, for him, essentially language and language is in turn being that is understood. It is, therefore, not unusual for Gadamer to hold statements like ‘the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou’. ⁹² In other terms, tradition is ontologised as the dialogical site par excellence, which both transcends and envelops the subject and the object, or, in Gadamer’s parlance, the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’. Sure, for Gadamer dialogical-hermeneutic experience takes place with tradition, since the latter is ‘a genuine partner in dialogue’, but above all it is a dialogue always within tradition seeing as ‘we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou’ – in short, there is no outside. ⁹³

Things are quite different with Adorno. Admittedly, his theory of negative dialectics weaves a tight bond between experience and tradition, if only in the form of an ‘unconscious remembrance’, since, as Adorno characteristically observes, ‘there is no question which we might simply ask, without knowing of past things that are preserved in the question and spur it’. ⁹⁴ Moreover, it is also true that he takes issue with the separation of (intellectual) experience and language advocated by a scientific – or rather, scientistic – attitude in the name of rooting out ‘linguistic slovenliness’, and purging language of its mythological (i.e. metaphysical) overtones. ⁹⁵ Adorno calls this process the ‘mathematisation of language’, though Herbert Marcuse offers perhaps a more apt account of it when he talks about the transformation of language into the lingo of ‘total administration’. ⁹⁶ The distinctive feature of this operation, Marcuse states, is the system(at)ic emphasis it puts on ‘positive [i.e. non-contradictory, non-adversarial] thinking and doing’ at the expense of all those negative experiential encounters and mediations that condition the path of ‘cognition and cognitive evaluation’. ⁹⁷ Hence, polar opposites are conflated, soothing clichés and platitudes proliferate, abbreviations serve as cloaks to hide the antinomic nature of states of affairs which they otherwise name, and so on, all aspects of a ‘matter-of-fact’ disposition that foists (its) static images there where fluent yet assiduous conceptual deliberation and expression are required. ⁹⁸ In such circumstances, Adorno contends, it is essential ‘not to follow where language leads, but to resist it with the aid of reflection’. ⁹⁹ Does this mean that there is after all a clear break between language and (intellectual) experience in Adorno? Not quite. If he calls for some degree of ‘suspicion’ towards language, it is not in a spirit of depreciation, but out of a desire to hold open a space for critical differentiation vis-à-vis the linguistic effort invested in every act of thought – the eventuality of an undiminished interlocutor. ‘To be known’, he famously observes in Negative Dialectics, ‘the inwardness to which cognition clings in expression always needs its own outwardness as well’. ¹⁰⁰ What is interesting, here, is that Adorno seems to position himself at the antipodes of Gadamer’s linguistic ontology by letting it be understood that language is misconstrued being. ¹⁰¹ While the hermeneuticist espouses the ‘basic idea that language[-qua-tradition] is a medium where I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together’, for the critical theorist such an ‘original belonging together’ would be as illusory as a unity of ‘I and world’ in the now. ¹⁰² After all, for Adorno, language-qua-tradition is the repository of sedimented prior experiential truth, but it is always also the bearer of the falsity that stands in the way of possible future experience. To be sure, Gadamer moves in the same direction when he draws – pace de Saussure – a quasi-ontological distinction between langage, langue and parole, that is to say, between the idea(l) of pure, transparent impartation and ‘the speaking word in its [collective or individual] working reality’, a difference, he affirms, ‘that certainly involves a strange form of concealment’. ¹⁰³ This is not to say that reality transpires ‘“behind the back” of language’, Gadamer elaborates elsewhere, but that it eventuates ‘behind the backs of those who live in the subjective opinion that they have understood “the world” (or can no longer understand it); that is, reality happens precisely within language’. ¹⁰⁴ But here is the problem: language is thereby at the same time rooted in the concrete social, historical and cultural realities of living and thinking women and men, and the supra-historical, trans-mundane ontological condition of every possible communicative or interpretative act. Viewed in this light, experience is moulded by and enclosed within the horizon of language – ‘reality happens precisely within language’ –, but seeing as language per se is basically ineffable – ‘[l]anguage is not a delimited realm of the speakable […] language is all-encompassing’ – the ambit of experience is set by its ontic manifestations, existing languages, which, though particular, still lay claim to universality. ¹⁰⁵ So too with tradition, for, as Gadamer argues, ‘language is not only an object in our hands, it is the reservoir of tradition and the medium in and through which we exist and perceive our world’. ¹⁰⁶ Which is to say, what is becomes with Gadamer the measure of what could be.

In Logiques des Mondes, Alain Badiou depicts the contemporary moment as a social, political, cultural and theoretical status quo founded on the premise that reality comprises solely ‘bodies and languages’; a state of affairs he labels ‘democratic materialism’. ¹⁰⁷ To this paradigm, which he deems far too restrictive, he opposes a ‘materialist dialectics’, which, while admitting that reality is indeed mainly made up of bodies and languages, also recognises that there are truths. ¹⁰⁸ As for the question of the nature of these ‘truths’ that are present in the midst of bodies and languages, Badiou could hardly offer a more Adornian response: they are immaterial bodies, meaningless languages, generic continua, unqualified addenda, that is, nonidentities/nonconceptualities – all that which, ‘not having yet come to pass, denounces what has’. ¹⁰⁹ The distinction Badiou makes between these two types of materialism proves especially useful in terms of gaining insight into the variances between Adorno’s and Gadamer’s models of philosophical interpretation/hermeneutics. Gadamer’s insistence on linguistic ontology and hermeneutic universality places him firmly within democratic materialism. To be sure, if, as he staunchly believes, language is all-encompassing, it follows that all that is, and all that could be, is in the end inscrib-ed/able in the modalities of language (i.e. particular languages), and the purview of the individuals and/or communities that generate and wield them. As for Adorno, his reflections on the ‘new categorical imperative’, the ‘additional factor’, the ‘shudder’, to name only a few key concepts of his philosophy, attest to the fact that there is for him something else besides ‘bodies and languages’ – a feature that aligns his theory of negative dialectics with ‘materialist dialectics’. ¹¹⁰ This ‘else’ inspires bodies and moves language, but is identical to neither. It is truth ciphered as possibility: the critical, reflexive and reflective process of coming to terms with those unruly moments of experience – an explorative hypothesis, a tentative axiom, an unexpected encounter or discovery, an intrusive memory, a flare of elation or indignation, and so on – that disrupt the established schemata of regulated appearances. ¹¹¹ Adorno and Gadamer are at one regarding the materialist dimension of undiminished experience: the other must be palpable, mediated by discursive thought, if it is to have any meaningful bearing on reality and not disintegrate into a hollow formal figure – it must be part of the dialogue, prompt a dialectical displacement within deep-seated modes of thinking and doing. As far as Gadamer is concerned, this displacement is affirmative. It involves the arrival of an extraneous element, and results not in an augmented cognition, ‘either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production’, but, through a confluence of horizons, to a differential, alternative understanding. ¹¹² With Adorno, this displacement takes instead the form of a subtraction: consciousness is enhanced not by accretions, but ‘by the act of the subject rending the veil it weaves about the object’, which it achieves when ‘passive, without anxiety, it entrusts itself to its own experience’. ¹¹³ That is to say, undiminished experience requires a moment of far-reaching self-critical reflection elicited by and for the sake of what is not ‘self’. Adorno explains thus that,

the surplus over the subject, which a subjective metaphysical experience will not be talked out of, and the element of truth in reity – these two extremes touch in the idea of truth. For there could no more be truth without a subject freeing itself from delusions than there could be truth without that which is not the subject, that in which truth has its archetype. ¹¹⁴

On this reading, undiminished experience is not about broadening the horizon of a hegemonic subject, but about gaining awareness of the cracks that exist in it and carving them out in the hope of being able to gaze at something ‘more’ past it. However, this more is not mystical, it is immanent and negative – it denotes all that which (in)exists in a state of nonidentity relative to the established constructs of identity, the inconsistent multiplicity that underlies the domain of regulated appearances. ¹¹⁵ For Adorno, alterity is not an outcome, one is always already in albeit not always aware of it, hence the aspiration to one day learn to see ‘the many as no longer inimical’. ¹¹⁶

Adorno and Gadamer are not on the same path, yet their thoughts run parallel. Suffice it to say, by way of conclusion, that while their theorisations of undiminished experience harbour elements of divergence, their understanding of ‘mimesis’ represents, by contrast, a notable point of convergence. The way Gadamer writes about it is telling: ‘the meaning of the word “mimesis” consists simply in letting something be there without trying to do anything more with it […] that something meaningful is there as itself’. ¹¹⁷ Adorno, for his part, correlates mimesis with neoterism. ‘Only in the new’, he characteristically writes, ‘does mimesis unite with rationality without regression: Ratio itself becomes mimetic in the shudder of the new’. ¹¹⁸ Adorno then expands on the nature of the ‘new’, which he qualifies as ‘a blind spot, as empty as the purely indexical gesture “look here”’. ¹¹⁹ The mimetic element in the experience of the new and other, the two philosophers seem to agree, attests to the fact that understanding is truly of the order of the event. Not only that, but Adorno’s and Gadamer’s approaches to mimesis dovetail on the former’s intuition that truth is subject to the ‘interpretive eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it is’, and that, ‘solely because of what it is’. ¹²⁰ This type of experience approximates a ‘negative hermeneutics’. Negative, in that it does not acquiesce in the merely given but orients itself towards the ganz Andere, the entirely other. A hermeneutics, for it does not settle for a bare factual itemisation of this other, but reads it instead as a dialogical gesture open to historical interpretation. Here, the poet’s words ring out with abiding topicality: il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. ¹²¹