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

constellation succeeds, and in the same way as Benjamin: namely, in an expression that
simultaneously gives a voice to the non-conceptual in the object and maintains a distance
from this content because what is given voice to is the object in its state of separation
from expression in (fallen) language, so that the relation between the constellation and
the object is that of a gaze looking at a ruin (but a ruin that calls for redemption). The
content that is expressed—the experiential origin of the object, or, what is the same, the
“non-conceptual” in the object—is not identical with the object, but rather discloses the
experiential context that first gave rise to the object as an original expression of suffering,
and this content stands in ineluctable opposition (non-identity) with the conceptual
elements also in the object (both the elements it explicitly offers as self-interpretation and
the elements that have become sedimented in the object through its interpretation). It is
the very distance (or “non-identity”) between the non-conceptual and the conceptual in
the object that is expressed: in other words, the object is exhibited as fragmented. But
this does not mean that the constellation fails to reveal the non-conceptual in the object.
Adorno says, “Konstellationen allein repräsentieren, von außen, was der Begriff im
Innern weggeschnitten hat, das Mehr, das er sein will so sehr, wie er es nicht sein kann.
Indem die Begriffe um die zu erkennende Sache sich versammeln, bestimmen sie
potentiell deren Inneres, erreichen denkend, was Denken notwendig aus sich
ausmerzte.” 397
397 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1970), 164-5, emphasis mine. English translation by E.B. Ashton in Negative Dialectics (New York and
London: Continuum, 2005), 162: “By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept
has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By
gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They
attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.”
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