CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

8.2 Adorno’s incorporation of Benjamin’s views on language
First, I want to emphasize the extent to which Adorno borrows from Benjamin’s
philosophy of language. I would argue, in fact, that all the elements proper to what I
have called the genealogical, or natural-historical strand of Adorno’s thought are indebted
to Benjamin. In what follows, I will first quickly go through the main elements that
Adorno takes from Benjamin’s philosophy of language and incorporates fully into his
account of negative dialectics. Then I will discuss the main difference between Adorno
and Benjamin, and I will argue for a way to conceptualize the issue that employs the
framework I have developed thus far for understanding Adorno’s negative dialectics; this
will yield a new way to thematize the Adorno-Benjamin debate that is, in my view,
particularly perspicuous.
Let us briefly consider the discussion of Benjamin above and the extent to which
Adorno takes Benjamin’s philosophy of language on board. First, there is the idea that
language harbors a capacity to express the non-conceptual, and that it is able to fulfill this
capacity by reviving its mimetic function, by which it is able to exhibit its object, not
discursively, but rather in (and not through) its rhetorical presentation. I have already
emphasized the importance of rhetoric for Adorno: “Rhetorik vertritt in Philosophie, was
rather in a two step process by which, through allegory, the object is first shown to be broken by the
catastrophic condition of the present, and then, in a second step that restitutes the symbolic function of
language, this catastrophic condition is translated into an imperative for radical transformation, an
imperative imposed by the object itself: a cry for redemption uttered by nature. The dialectical image no
longer holds a merely melancholy attitude toward the past and the state of the object, but rather fulfills the
object in a new configuration of the present: the present as infinite possibility for radical conversion and
for a new appropriation of the past. In this sense, the dialectical image achieves a symbolic task, but this
task is construed differently from the Romantic conception of symbolism, because the transcendence
revealed in the dialectical image is not the transcendence of a meaningful object in-itself, given as
reconciled with language; but is rather the transcendence of possibility at the heart of the present.
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