Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

14
American Academy of Religion Transcendence in the Light of Redemption: Adorno and the Legacy of Rosenzweig and Benjamin Author(s): Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 539-551 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465128 . Accessed: 01/04/2011 10:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press and American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion. http://www.jstor.org

Transcript of Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Page 1: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

American Academy of Religion

Transcendence in the Light of Redemption: Adorno and the Legacy of Rosenzweig andBenjaminAuthor(s): Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr.Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp.539-551Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465128 .Accessed: 01/04/2011 10:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Oxford University Press and American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LXI/3

Transcendence in the Light of Redemption Adorno and the Legacy of Rosenzweig and Benjamin

Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr.

TERMS: TRANSCENDENCE AND THE LIGHT OF REDEMPTION

PRIOR TO THE dawn of Derrida, the postmodern polemic had already been sounded in a variety of anti-idealist philosophies, whose arguments had in common a resistance to all totalizing schemas. Each in its own way was concerned to articulate that which 'transcends' iden- tity. A number of twentieth century Jewish thinkers, especially Theodor Adomo, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin, proposed philosophi- cal strategies by which this transcendence-of-totality might be sustained. Each was committed, whether explicitly or not, to a form of ontological pluralism in which "the other" might escape the ravages of "the system."

The work of each of them borrowed from, but cannot be reduced to, theological forms of reflection, particularly those which can be labeled eschatological or utopian. Thus Adomo could write that

the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. .... Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light .... Beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly mat- ters. (1974a:247)

Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. is the General Editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works translation project and a Visiting Professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

539

Page 3: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

540 Journal of the American Academy of Relgion

"In the light of redemption," difference or othemess is not to be healed or overcome, but rather affirmed. Thus, the goal of all non-hierarchical, eschatological visions of reality is a thinking which can linger, shepherding "the world . . . with its rifts and crevices, as . . . it will appear one day in the messianic light." It aims for what Adorno called "diversity without domination"-the sustenance of the other beyond the hegemony of totality.'

Adorno's self-consciously non-religious, negative-dialectical writings need to be placed back into the context of their more explicitly theologi- cal roots, as glimpsed through the extended collaborations between Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Adorno's anti-systematic project was informed heavily by the Jewish negative-theological tradition, as medi- ated to him by such works as Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977),2 and to a lesser extent by works of Jewish theologians such as Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (1977).3 A contemporary recovery of these utopian or messianic strands from Benjamin and Rosenzweig-mediated through Adornmo-may well assist the formula- tion of the beginnings of a negative-dialectical, non-metaphysical model for understanding the transcendence-of-the-other, and thus for that ontological pluralism which often serves to mark the postmodern project.

ROSENZWEIG'S CRITIQUE OF TOTALITY: THE STAR OF REDEMPTION

During the formative period of Adorno's intellectual life in the 1920s, a number of thinkers, including Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch, were returning "to specifically Jewish religious thought in an attempt to redeem philosophy from its current atrophy" (Buck-Morss:5).4 Among them was Franz Rosenzweig, whose book, The Star of Redemption, was published in 1920.5

In the Star we see several of the central themes which Adorno would develop over his career in his critique of totalizing-philosophies, from

I The theme of redemption in Adorno also is treated in Siebert, Thaidigsmann, and Whitebook. 20n the theological roots of Benjamin's thought, see Guenther and Wolin (37ff.). 3See also Cohen.

4Entr&es to Rosenzweig's work range from Glatzer's standard rendering (1953) to Dietrich's excel- lent update. 5For a fuller discussion of Rosenzweig's argument against idealism, see Floyd (1989), Freund, and

Moses (1982).

Page 4: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd: Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 541

"The Actuality of Philosophy" (1931) to his Negative Dialectics (1966). "Philosophy," Rosenzweig had argued,

deceives [us] ... by weaving the blue mist of its idea of the All about the earthly. ... Philosophy has to rid the world of what is singular, and this ... is also the reason why it has to be idealistic. For idealism, with its

denial of everything that distinguishes the singular from the All, is the philosopher's trade. (1970:3-4)

Over against all such totalizing, neo-Platonic, and idealistic philoso- phies-in which "the end merges again with the beginning" (Rosen- zweig 1970:145)-Rosenzweig insistently argued that "reality was fragmentary, composed of a 'plenitude' of individual, distinct phenom- ena" (Buck-Morss:5). Rosenzweig argued for the ontological integrity of such individual phenomena, which "simply exist. But in existence they are individual, each a one against all others, each distinguished from all others, 'particular', 'not-otherwise' " (1970:45). Four years after the Star was published, Rosenzweig was to call his work there a form of "abso- lute empiricism," in which each entity is "only to be traced back to

itself"--each is "its own reality" (1937:398, 379, 383). Particularly in Chapters 1-3 of Part I of the Star, Rosenzweig maintained that his intent was "to demonstrate that the three concepts of thought-God, World, and Man-cannot be deduced one from the other, but that each one of them has an independent essence" (Glatzer 1970:xiv). In support of the ontological integrity of the world and humanity, later in the Star (Part II, Book One) he argued that God creates, rather than emanates, the world of phenomena, which is thus qualitatively different from divinity. As Adorno himself later will echo, for Rosenzweig it is precisely this quali- tatively different phenomenon that "had been the stumbling block of ide- alism, and thus of philosophy as a whole from Parmenides to Hegel" (Rosenzweig 1970:47).

In the case of humanity, again Rosenzweig's emphasis is on particu- larity. Humanity, for Rosenzweig, must be thought as Adam, the proper "name," singular and particular. "It is incapable of utter absorption in the category for there can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category" (1970:186-87). Humanity is no more to be thought to be absorbed in God than the proper name can be thought to be absorbed in a genus that sublates it.

Thus in asking the religious question of the nature of redemption, Rosenzweig is pushed to a form of philosophical pluralism. In Part II, Book Three of the Star, "Redemption or The Eternal Future of the King- dom," Rosenzweig asserts that the redemption of the world has a "cho- ral form" (1970:231):

Page 5: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

542 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

The concluding stanza of the chant of redemption begins with the We. .... Finally everything gathers, with the We, in the uniform choral tempo of the multivoiced finale. All voices have become independent here, each singing the words to the melody of its own soul; yet all these melodies adapt themselves to the same rhythm and unite in the single harmony. (1970:237)

To this extent, Rosenzweig's project fulfills his own call for a truly "dia- logical" philosophy, in which the I "does not know in advance what the other will say to me," where the conversation "will come out" (1937:387). There is a certain contingency within redemption itself.6

BENJAMIN: THE CONSTELLATION OF PARTICULARS

The relationship between the work of Adorno and Benjamin is as easily demonstrable as Benjamin's Jewish negative-theological rootage is indubitable.7 Prior to the beginning of his relationship to Adorno, Ben- jamin from 1916 to 1923 had been closely associated with Gershom Scholem, and through him had learned from the tradition of Kabbalistic mysticism (Scholem 1982). In 1919-20 Benjamin read Ernst Bloch and Franz Rosenzweig (Lunn:177).8 He knew and spoke often with Martin Buber (Buck-Morss:6-7).9

One of the most direct influences of Benjamin's combination of phi- losophy and religious mysticism upon Adorno's work was through the former's Origin of German Tragic Drama, published in 1928. In that work Benjamin argued, like Rosenzweig, for the philosophical affirma- tion of the particular. The individual cannot be subsumed under general concepts; the universal is grasped only through the particular.

Benjamin no less than, later, Adorno was "unremittingly hostile to the moment of triumphant reconciliation that traditionally capped a dia- lectical process" (Jay 1984a:15). Philosophy's goal is what Benjamin called redemption, in which "the false appearance of totality is extin- guished" (1977:176). Redemption must thus be interpreted as "a cate-

6For Rosenzweig, "[finally but] only in redemption, God becomes the One and All which, from the first, human reason in its rashness has everywhere sought and everywhere asserted, and yet nowhere found because it simply was nowhere to be found yet, for it did not exist yet." Still, "man and world disappear in the redemption . . ." (1970:238). This has led some to argue that finally Rosenzweig is still within the idealist camp (Charry:69; Moses 1976:351-66). 7One of the best introductions to the relationship between Adorno and Benjamin is the former's

own "Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften" (1983b:2-17). 80n the relationship between Rosenzweig and Benjamin, see Moses (1989). 9Concerning the dynamic relationship between Judaism and modernist and Marxist movements

during this period see Dobkowski and Gay.

Page 6: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd: Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 543

gory of a more 'negative' than positive theology" (Jay 1984b:251; 1977:131-34). Understood in this way, redemption is not to be equated with reconciliation, if reconciliation means overcoming the quality of 'difference' itself. Redemption means, rather, the recovery of the partic- ular from its dominating-hierarchical subsumption under some larger category. 10

The result was Benjamin's notion of the anti-systematic function of what he called "Constellations."" "Ideas," in Benjamin's words, "are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements' being seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed" (1977:35). As Martin Jay interprets it, a constel- lation is thus "a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle" (1984a:14-15).

Benjamin's Kabbalistically-inspired idea of redemption at times appears to argue, in Richard Wolin's terms, that "origin is the goal"- "the return to the condition of universal harmony, . . . usually envi- sioned in terms of a return to paradise." To this extent Benjamin can sound neo-Platonic and idealistic. Yet, as Wolin argues, "though this idea can at times take the form of a static, purely restorative conception of redemption, quite often it is infused with radical and utopian ele- ments . . . a return to a content merely implicit in the original paradisia- cal state. . ." (38-39). There is in Benjamin's understanding of

redemption a Messianic and transformative power. In Benjamin's words,

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, how- ever, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter. (1978a:264)12

Later Benjamin and Adorno were to engage in an intense debate over the extent to which theory is extinguished in the Utopian recovery of the Other. Adomo was to argue that Benjamin underplayed the role

loAdorno's later resistance against what he called "extorted reconciliation" [Erpresste Versiihnung], or "Reconciliation Under Duress," has an indubitably Benjaminian ring to it (1974b).

11See Wolin (90ff). Adorno draws on this notion in Negative Dialectics (1973:162-63). 120n Benjamin's philosophical interpretation of Messianism, see his "Theologico-Political Frag-

ment" (1978b:312-13), Wolin (48ff), and Scholem (1971).

Page 7: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

544 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

of subjectivity.13 Adomo's remarks against Simmel might have been directed against this reputed "positivism" of Benjamin, which, Adomo argued, "has admittedly maintained contact with the reality with which it deals, but in so doing has lost all claim to make sense out of the empirical world which presses in upon it, and becomes resigned to 'the living' as a blind and unenlightened concept of nature .. ." (1977:121). The key to Adomo's differentiation from Benjamin, as we shall see below, was Adomo's argument that any critique of monistic-totalizing ontology itself requires the reassertion of a form of subjectivity, what he termed a dialectics, which can sustain itself against the overwhelming weight of that longing for the Absolute, that "ontological pathos" (1983a:134) which would reopen the question of the plurality of Being only by foreclosing on any prerogative of the subject.

ADORNO'S ESCHATOLOGICAL VISION: DIVERSITY WITHOUT DOMINATION

Adomo himself, however, was never overtly "theological" in the way that Rosenzweig and Benjamin so clearly had been. Indeed, as Adomo wrote to Benjamin concerning their discussions together, he was happi- est to think of "our theology" as "inverse" or "negative" (1970:103- 104).

Still, as early as Adomo's 1931 essay, "The Actuality of Philosophy," the importance of which for his Negative Dialectics has been noted at least since Buck-Morss's work (69), we can see the heavy influence of Benjamin's arguments against totalizing thinking. The crisis of philoso- phy, Adomo argues, is "a crisis in philosophy's pretensions to totality" (1977:120). The requisite philosophical strategy then is twofold:

The role of the subject is not to accomplish totality but to maintain differ- ence, to disallow its own pretensions to identity with the object, the commensurability of thought and reality. The role of the object is not to maintain a dualism, but to impinge upon the solipsistic subject and demand a recognition both of the subject's incompleteness, its inability to conceptualize reality completely, and the object's incompleteness, its brokenness and fragmentation in a finite and socially distorted reality. (Floyd 1988:63, emphases added)

Thus, for Adomo as for Rosenzweig and Benjamin, the restoration of

13See Buck-Morss (136-84) and Wolin (163-212).

Page 8: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd: Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 545

philosophy must begin with a radical critique of idealism and its affirm- ative dialectics of totality.

Such a critique undercuts modemity's idealist underpinnings, refus- ing to submit to "the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself. ... [in which] to say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults" (Adomo 1974a:18, 190). It resists the temptation to any foundationalism, for "a tendency to regression, a hatred of the complicated, is steadily at work in theory of origins, thus guaranteeing its affinity with lordship. ... The enemy, the other, the nonidentical is always also what is distinguished and differen- tiated from the subject's universality" (1983:20). Adomo deconstructs any vision of the future-as-redemption, or reconciliation-in or beyond history-that overcomes otherness, or transcendence. Negative dialec- tics challenges idealism's claim of "inclusiveness and completeness" (1983a:29) even when deferred into the future-the "drive for system" which Nietzsche had taught it to mistrust (1983a:28). Adomo criticizes such totality with regard to its epistemological foundations, arguing that

great philosophy was accompanied by a paranoid zeal to tolerate noth- ing else, and to pursue everything else with all the cunning of reason, while the other kept retreating father and farther from the pursuit. The slightest remnant of nonidentity sufficed to deny an identity conceived as total. (1973:22)

And he censures totality for its ethical implications as well, in one of the most caustic passages from Negative Dialectics:

Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are leveled off-"polished off," as the German military called it-until one exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death. Negative dialectics intervenes in the process of totality for the sake of the non-identical particular. (1973:362)

Against Hegel's system, Adomo tenaciously contends that "no matter how dynamically a system may be conceived, if it is in fact to be a closed system, to tolerate nothing outside its domain, it will become a positive infinity-in other words, finite and static" (1973:27). To the contrary, genuine, or negative, "dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity" (5). Against idealism's need for systematic unity, summarized in the Hegelian maxim that "the true is the whole" (Hegel:par. 20), Adorno's negative dialectics "returns its attention from the totality of the One to the non-identity of the multiplicity of the Many" (Floyd 1988:193). Adomo argues that "even the Eleatic concept of the supposedly isolated

Page 9: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

546 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

One is comprehensible only in its relation to the Many that it negates," so that "without the Idea of the Many, that of the One could never be specified" (1983a:9).

Thus Adomo noted of his own project that "a turn toward noniden- tity is the hinge of negative dialectics" (1973:12). Adomo entitled his immanent approach "an anti-system" (1973:xx), a dialectics of non- identity, or negative dialectics. It was preeminently negative vis a vis the fact that "as early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something posi- tive by means of negation," to reconcile non-identity into an all-embrac- ing totality. Adomo's approach would seek, to the contrary, "to free dialectics from such affirmative traits" (1973:xix).'4 Adomo wished to recognize what he calls philosophy's "ontological need" (1973:61). Yet, a genuinely "critical theory would . .. affirm the ontological need, this longing, without capitulating to the ontological conclusion--... as pre- viously in idealism-of the identity of subject and object" (Floyd 1988:178). As Adomo trenchantly concluded, "the ontological need can no more guarantee its object than the agony of the starving assures them of food" (1973:65).

Adomo's Negative Dialectics explores a strategy for overcoming the ontological Sehnsucht of "first philosophy." Its subtlety comes in the fact that he refuses to criticize monistic ontology by "merely positing another downright 'first'-not absolute identity, this time, not the concept, not Being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity" (136). Thus, he concludes, "it is not the purpose of critical thought to place the object on the orphaned throne once occupied by the subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol. The purpose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy" (181). For wherever any "doctrine of some absolute 'first' is taught," Adomo is adamant, it is clear that "there will be talk of some- thing inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correlate. Prima philosophia and dualism go together" (138). Adomo is not arguing for such a hierarchical dualism, but for a dynamic, non-hierarchical duality, or plurality-the non-identity of sub- ject and object, each dynamically mediated by the other. For "if we cancel the subject's claim to be first," Adomo maintains, then "that which the schema of traditional philosophy calls secondary is no longer secondary either" (139). A "negative ontology" of the preponderance of the object must be capable of denying idealistic dialectics its own affirm-

14Buck-Morss notes that as late as his 1963 foreword to his Drei Studien zu Hegel (1969:8) Adorno had referred only inexactly to his efforts to formulate "an altered concept of the dialectic." This was not directly stated or developed until the Negative Dialectics (Buck-Morss:233n2).

Page 10: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd- Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 547

ative ontological conclusions concerning the identity of subject and object, of thought and being. "If ontology were possible at all," Adorno concludes, "it would be possible in an ironic sense, as the epitome of negativity" (121). To retain the particular, that which transcends total- ity, "totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself- of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept" (147). This rqeuires the radical intervention of critical theory, not its renunciation, as he feared was the case in Benjamin's work.

CONCLUSION: REVISIONING TRANSCENDENCE

Adomo's social ontology is premised upon plurality as the task of a critical theory: redemption as itself the critique of totality. The chal- lenge for any such negative dialectics is both to retain the plurality of others which are not subsumed under some finally inclusive totality and to see such diversity as a dialectical task, never an immediate given:

If mediation is not, as idealism had supposed, a logic of totality-a logic of integration-then neither can it simply be renounced. Rather media- tion must be shown, through a sustained, dynamic method of criticism, to entail a dialectic of disintegration of totality for the sake of a prepon- derant and dynamic non-identity. (Floyd 1988:203)

Thus "redemption" in Adomo depends more upon critique than it did for Benjamin. Adomo's is more of a hermeneutic of suspicion. It uncompromisingly censures what Rosenzweig had called idealism's "denial of everything that distinguishes the singular from the All" (1970:4), whereas Benjamin's messianism entails more of a restorative vision.

In this fashion, negative dialectics proposes a way of engaging in the redemption of genuine transcendence itself. The redemption of tran- scendence demands an ontological diversity that can persist equiprimordially, that is to say, without the marginalization of the Other by the One, or the One by the Other. Such transcendence both resists the dialectical urge towards the totality of the One and provides and sustains the necessary non-hierarchical context for the non-identity of the Other.

Adomo thus remained indebted to what he calls "the most enduring result of Hegelian logic," the methodological dictum that "the individual is not flatly for himself," but "in himself, he is his otherness and linked with others" (1973:161). But Adomo's vision of redemption is a radical critique of Hegel's vision of reconciliation as totality. In Adorno's words, "utopia would be ... a togetherness of diversity" (149), an Oth-

Page 11: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

548 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

emess which he demands be even more extreme than the "negativity" of Hegel's dialectic.

Beyond the hierarchies which demean, Adorno muses in Negative Dialectics, "the reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different. . ." (1973:191). Transcendence in the light of redemption is a matter of diversity, not totality; yet it is also a matter of togetherness, not dualism. In the light of redemption-the "state of recon- ciliation" (1978:499)-negative dialectics sustains the difference-per- petual non-identity, enduring heterogeneity-to which epistemology's subject-object tension referred. This is the task of critical theory. The view from redemption is what Adorno calls "peace": "distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other" (1978:500). If in the unreconciled condition the nonidentity of genuine Transcendence is experienced as a negative phenomenon (1973:30), in the light of redemption, transcendence can be seen for the positive phe- nomenon it has always been. Genuine shalom demands not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice, between the One and the Many.

Dialectical reconciliation for Adorno is neither "what tolerates noth- ing that is not like itself" (1973:142), nor is it the mere resignation of subject and object to the false security of an illusory "relationship" of static presence to each other-even by means of "the theological con- ception of the paradox" (1973:375). If "Parmenides had already taught that what is perceived and what perceives resemble each other, while Heraclitus pleaded that only the unlike and contrasted can recognize the like" (1973:143), Adorno follows Heraclitus, not the Eleatics. Thus, in the light of redemption we do not arrive at "the terminus ad quem of a positive dialectics according to which the 'many' are merely the occa- sions for the mediation of the 'One' " (Floyd 1988:216). The significant dividing line, according to Adomo, between his own position and that of Hegel's is finally

drawn by our intent: whether in our consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, we maintain that identity is the ultimate, that it is absolute, that we want to reinforce it--or whether we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from .... (1973:147)

In the light of redemption, according to Adomo, reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion,

Page 12: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd: Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 549

including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplic- ity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Recon- cilement would be the thought of the many as no longer inimical ... (1973:6)

In the light of redemption, beyond monism and dualism, the oblitera- tion of otherness, not transcendence, would be anathema.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor Drei Studien zu Hegel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1969 1970 Uber Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp

Verlag. 1973 Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New

York: Seabury Press. 1974a Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans

by E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso. 1974b Noten zur Literatur. In Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. XI.

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. 1977 "The Actuality of Philosophy." Telos 31 (Spring):120-

33. 1978 "Subject and Object." In The Essential Frankfurt School

Reader. Edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Urizen Books.

1983a Against Epistemology. A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: MIT Press.

1983b "Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften." In On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections. Edited by Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Benjamin, Walter Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by J. Os- 1977 borne. London: New Left Books.

1978a "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In Illumina- tions. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zahn. New York: Schocken.

1978b "Theologico-Political Fragment." In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Ed- mund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jova- novich.

Page 13: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

550 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Buck-Morss, Susan The Ongin of Negative Dialectics. New York: The Free 1977 Press, 1977.

Charry, Ellen T. Franz Rosenzweig and the Freedom of God. Briston: 1987 Wyndham Hall Press.

Cohen, Arthur A. "Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption: Mystic 1981 Epistemology Without Kabbalah." JAAR Thematic

Studies 48/1:65-81.

Dietrich, Wendell S. "Franz Rosenzweig: Recent Works in French." Reli- 1987 gious Studies Review 13/2 (April):97-103.

Dobkowski, Michael "Judaism and Marxism: On the Necessity of Dia- N. logue." In Approaches to Modem Judaism, 31-62. Ed-

1983 ited by Marc Lee Raphael. Chico: Scholars Press.

Floyd, Wayne Theology and the Dialectics of Otherness. On Reading Whitson Bonhoeffer and Adomo. Lanham: University Press of

1988 America. 1989 "To Welcome the Other: Totality and Theory in

Levinas and Adomo." Philosophy and Theology 4/2 (Winter): 145-70.

Freund, Else-Rahel Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of 1979 The Star of Redemption. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Gay, Peter "Encounter with Modernism: German Jews in German 1978 Culture, 1890-1914." In Freud, Jews and Other

Germans, 93-168. New York: Oxford University Press.

Glatzer, Nahum N. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. New York: 1953 Schocken Books. 1970 "Foreword" to The Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig

1970).

Guenther, Henning Walter Benjamin: Zwischen Marxismus und Theologie. 1974 Olten, Switzerland: Walter.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by William Wal- 1982 lace. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jay, Martin "The Concept of Totality in Lukics and Adomo." 1977 Telos 32 (Summer):117-37.

1984a Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Page 14: Adorno, Benjamin, Rosenzweig

Floyd: Transcendence in the Light of Redemption 551

1984b Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukcdcs to Habermas. Berkeley: University of Califomia Press.

Lunn, Eugene Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukhcs, 1982 Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Moses, Stephane "La critique de la totalite dans la philosophie de Franz 1976 Rosenzweig." Les Etudies philosophiques 3:351-66. 1982 Systeme et Revelation: La philosophie de Franz Rosenzweig.

Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1989 "Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig." In Benja-

min: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rosenzweig, Franz "Das neue Denken." In Gesammelte Schriften, 3:139- 1937 61. Berlin: Schocken. 1970 The Star of Redemption. Translated by William R. Hal-

lo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Scholem, Gershom "On the Messianic Idea in Judaism." In The Messianic 1971 Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 9-

36. New York: Schocken. 1982 Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. London:

Faber &e Faber.

Siebert, Rudolf J. "Adomo's Theory of Religion." Telos 58 (Winter):108- 1983/84 14.

Thaidigsmann, "Der Blick der Erlisung: Zu Adomo's letztem Aphor- Edgar ismus in den 'Minima Moralia.' " Zeitschriftfiir Theo- 1984 logie und die Kirche 81/4:491-513.

Whitebook, Joel "The Politics of Redemption." Telos 63 (Spring):156- 1985 68.

Wolin, Richard Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: 1982 Columbia University Press.