TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

Adorno‘s adoption of Lukacs‘ belief in the acquired essence of subjectivity meant
that he was risking a form of historical relativism; truth for Adorno could easily be
construed as the apt apprehension of a thing‘s historicity. In order for his sense of natural
history to not fall into this trap, Adorno was leery of it becoming another ―meaning-filled
totality.‖ Buck-Morss informs us that it is here that Adorno borrows most accurately from
Benjamin‘s trauerspiel study. Specifically Adorno makes use of Benjamin‘s decision to
turn his Kant studies in one particular direction. In their study of Kant, Scholem
introduced Benjamin to the language and rigors of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin turned
that language away from religious mystery and applied it to aesthetic thought:
―Benjamin‘s religiosity was secular and mundane, at the same time that he approached
profane objects with a religious reverence. His was thus an ―inverse‖ or ―negative‖
theology in which mysticism and materialism converged, and as a model for
philosophical thinking it made no little impression on Adorno‖ (6).
Benjamin‘s religion of the mundane was an extension of his reading of the
substance of the allegorical citation-work implicit in the chronicle-structure of the
baroque trauerspiel. Allegory, as we have noted, did not mean a story invested in drawing
out communal values and ideas but: ―was instead the concrete expression of that idea‘s
material foundation‖ (Buck-Morss 56). The allegorical could only present concrete
particulars of either natural or historical ―extremity‖ if it made itself felt to its observer as
belonging to a ruin or a fragment of an ephemeral cultural totality. It was the habit of
holistic occlusion that drew Adorno to Benjamin‘s reading of allegory. The productive
value of such an occlusion was that it guaranteed the mystery of historical material, that
un-theorizable ―first nature‖ that Lukacs found embedded in the life-world of things. That
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