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diacritics, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 48-62 (Article)

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Adornos conception of the form of philosophyStewart Martin

Adornos attention to issues of form is familiar and routinely discussed, and there have been numerous studies on Adornos style and of the affinity of his philosophical writing to literary and, in particular, musical forms. In this essay, however, form is considered only insofar as it contributes to articulating a conception of philosophy as such. Above all, Adornos idea of philosophy, as articulated through his idea of its form or presenta-tion, is sought here. Form is considered as one of the principal ways in which Adorno addressed the decisive issue for Frankfurt School Critical Theory of the redefinition and reconstitution of philosophy after Marx and the crisis of German Idealism.1 The examina-tion of form here is therefore strictly metaphilosophicala contribution, via Adorno, to what might be characterized as philosophical morphology, rather than any more generic mode of criticism. Adorno is emphatic that the presentation [Darstellung] of philosophy is not an ex-ternal matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea.2 But, despite such claims, his conception of what this presentation is, and therefore what the idea of philosophy is to which it is immanent, remains profoundly obscure. Through the generation of a philo-sophical context, Adornos few and often elliptical remarks can acquire the legibility and importance that are at stake here. Adornos renowned declaration of negative Dialectics as an anti-system [negative Dialectics xx/10] is the familiar touchstone for discus-sions of his conception of form. But for this characterization to be read in terms of the idea of philosophy as suchrather than in terms of some other stylistic or presentational problem, and in the absence of much supporting evidenceit needs to be considered in relation to what it negates, namely, the idea of system as an idea of philosophy. If we seek to elaborate this idea, we are quickly led to Adornos criticisms of modern system-atic philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. These criticisms are complicated, however, by Adornos critique of dogmatism, which equally motivates his conception of philosophi-cal form, but which is also indebted to certain dimensions of systematic philosophy. The origin of this complex may be found in Kants critique of dogmatism as it is elaborated as a critique of dogmatic form. For Kant, the dogmatic form of philosophy is, strictly speaking, the attempt to achieve apodictic certainty through the misemployment of philosophical concepts as if they were mathematical concepts. This is his essential methodological objection to the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, and latterly Wolff.3 It is the source of Kants famous contention that definitionsat least in the sense of complete and original presentationsare alien to the form of philosophy and philosophizing. It induces a profound rejection of Descartess and Spinozas adoption of Euclids axiomatic systematization as a principle of the form

1. this problem was the topic of my PhD thesisAdorno and the Problem of Philosophy, Middlesex University, 2002from which this essay is derived. 2. adorno, Negative Dialectics 18/Negative Dialektik 29. Where necessary, I have modified the english translations cited throughout this essay. 3. the key text here is the Discipline of Pure reason in its Dogmatic employment.

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of philosophy. However, the qualities Kant attributes to the presentation of philosophical, as opposed to mathematical, conceptsopen-ended, provisional, discursive, acroamatic, bound to experience, linguistic; qualities that resonate with the recognition of the histori-cal form of philosophical reasoning or philosophizing4are not only incompatible with the model of system derived from geometric axiomatization. They also reject the alterna-tive of a mere aggregation of elements, simultaneously developing a form of relation or unity which generates a new, organic model of system. Rather than a system premised on the foundation of a set of privileged axioms, which remain unchanged in their extension or application, a concept of system is generated in which elements are part of a complex, changing, and open-ended interrelationship, the essence of which is revealed through each of its parts, rather than merely in one foundational part of it. This indication of a new concept of system would become fundamental for the devel-opment of Romanticism and German Idealism, despite their criticisms of Kant. Adornos relation to this heritage is effectively to renew and redirect Kants critique of dogmatism toward this new, nonaxiomatic concept of system, generating a critique of philosophys aspiration to the form of a system tout court. Adorno argues that even Hegels system of absolute knowledgethe pinnacle of post-Cartesian systematic philosophyreduces the absolute (the infinite) to its finite presentation and thereby contradicts it. Adorno main-tains that the absolute can only be presented negatively andinsofar as the form of sys-tem creates the illusion of a finite presentation of the absoluteantisystematically. Benja-mins significant early conception of constellation as a nonsystematic form of philosophy attempts to register this disjunction between the absolute and the finite. Yet by recourse to a theological appeal to the name, Benjamin thereby recovers a form of antisystematic dogmatism. The critique of Benjamins dogmatism produces Adornos distinctive con-ception of the form of philosophy. Nonetheless, Adornos rejection of systematic philosophy should not be overstated. It is directed at the conception of system as an autonomous, self-sufficient and thereby closed form, founded on its immanence, to which transcendence or externality is either subsumed or excluded. However, Adorno did not want to dissolve the forms of com-plex determination generated through systematicity, a project he discerns in Nietzsche, for whom there belongs a wholly different power and agility to what establishes itself in an incomplete system with freely unenclosed prospects, than to a dogmatic world.5 Adorno remains our contemporary, insofar as he did not assume the cultural authority of systematic philosophy. His critique of it is made in the face not of its dominance but of its decline, and he is concerned to salvage what remains of value from its suppression: the absoluteness with which the form of the system was infused, in contrast to the injunc-tion typical of sciences that claim to be systematic in the limited form of an ordering of data for coherence or clarity, or hypothetical modelling. Adornos criticism of systematic philosophy does not attempt to support its renewal within the sciences or recommend its reversal into mere aggregation; nor does he seek to retrieve it as it was. In the manner of Benjamins destructive historiography, he treats it as a ruin, which, as ruined, releases potentialities that are suppressed within its original form. The critique of system therefore becomes the remembrance of the coherence of the nonidenticalthe recognition of the nonidentical as not just an arbitrary or irrational excessthat was repressed with the idea of an absolute system as a principle of identity, that is to say, as a principle of the tran-scendental subject:

4. See Discipline of Pure reason a735/B763 5. Friedrich nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke 9: 361, qtd. in adorno, Philosophische Terminolo-gie 1: 26.

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the conception of the system recalls, in reversed form, in the coherence of the nonidentical, that which is violated by deductive systematics. Criticism of sys-tems and asystematic thought are superficial as long as they cannot release the cohesive force which the idealistic systems had signed over to the transcenden-tal subject. [Adorno, negative Dialectics 36/26]

Adorno therefore extends the deconstruction of system as a principle of identity, which had already been implied by Kants differentiation of systematic reasoning from a sys-tem of reason, but which was limited by Kants commitment to the system provided by the subject as the organon of thinking.6 the destruction of system reveals, in the recol-lection of its ruined monuments, the fragments of an alternative form of philosophical presentation.

Constellations

Broadly following Kants methodology, Adorno maintains that philosophical concepts do not present their content, the nonconceptual, immediately. Philosophizing presents the nonconceptual indirectly or discursively, through the combination of a plurality of different concepts, which attempt to present the nonconceptual through their interrela-tion. The experience of nonidentity, revealed in the failure of a concept to sufficiently identify the nonconceptual, informs a process whereby such an inadequate concept is combined with other concepts that attempt, from different vantages, to conceptualize the nonconceptual; endeavoring to say, through their combination, what they could not say individually. Through these combinations, or constellations, Adorno argues, a claim to truth is sustained analogous to the ontological force of the name, but without a delusive claim to immediacy: The determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited something of the hope of the name. The language of philosophy approaches that name by denying it [negative Dialectics 53/62]. The model for this is not mathematical axiomatization but language, inasmuch as it is essentially distinct from any immediate presentation of what it seeks to communicate:

Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of presentation [darstel-lung], it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts centred about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means. [162/164]

Constellations attempt to reveal the interior of an object through a combination of con-cepts that, from the outside, as it were, try to present the relations in which an object stands and thereby the relations through which the object is internally constituted.

6. now if in the speculative employment of pure reason there are no dogmas to serve as its special subject-matter, all dogmatic methods, whether borrowed from the mathematician or spe-cially invented, are as such inappropriate. For they only serve to conceal defects and errors, and to mislead philosophy, whose true purpose is to present every step of reason in the clearest light. nevertheless its method can always be systematic. For our reason is itself, subjectively, a system, though in its pure employment, by means of concepts, it is no more than a system whereby our in-vestigations can be conducted in accordance with principles of unity, the material being provided by experience alone [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason a73738/B76566].

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Constellations generate what Adorno refers to as models. Models are the prod-uct of constellations; they are the forms generated through thinking in constellations. Adornos concept of model is obscure. He describes models as an alternative to philoso-phizing through examples, taken to be merely illustrative of an idea: [Models] are not examples; they do not simply elucidate general reflections. . . . [They are] opposed to the use of examples as matters of indifference in themselves [xx/10]. Models are said to be the working out of the actuality of the idea, not merely abstractive. A model covers the specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general su-per-concept [29/39]. For Adorno, the generation of models as constellations of concepts is the unit of philosophy as a whole, which is in turn to be composed of a constellation of models. Thus, the third part of negative Dialectics is called Models, which are to make plain what negative dialectics is and to bring it into the realm of reality, in line with its own concept [xx/10].7 These are not external containers of thought, but a form of thought or philosophizing itself: Philosophical thinking is the same as thinking in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of analyses of models.8 In order to appreciate the concept of model in Adorno it is necessary to see it as an attempt to appropriate Benjamins early conception of constellation as the mode of pre-sentation of ideas. Adorno effectively introduced the term model as a more scientifically respectable translation of the rather mystical connotations of constellation.9 Benjamin introduced the term constellation as a way of describing the presentation of ideas in rela-tion to objects: Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [Origin 34/214]. Con-stellation is therefore an analogy that attempts to draw attention to the disjunctive relation of objects to ideas. They refer to the form in which ideas provide a presentation of truth, as opposed to the presentation of knowledge. But ideas are not presented [darstellen] in themselves, but solely and exclusively through an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the configuration of these elements [Origin 34/214]. Concepts are configured such that the unity that constitutes the order of knowledgethe rules of the appearance of objectsis transformed into the unity of truth. This introduces Benjamins strict division between the properly philosophical concern of the presentation of truth through the configuration of concepts into ideas, and the properly scientific concern of the presentation of knowledge through concepts of objects. The configuration of concepts in the presentation of ideas transforms the knowledge of objects into a presenta-tion of truth, in which the absolute or infinite order of their being is revealed.10 Just as

7. Part 3 of Negative Dialectics comprises three models: Freedom: On the Metacritique of Practical reason, world Spirit and natural History: an excursion into Hegel, and Medita-tions on Metaphysics. 8. negative Dialektik [ist] ein ensemble von Modellanalysen [39/29]. adorno appears to mimic Marxs phrase from the theses on Feuerbach: in its reality [human essence] is the ensemble of social relations. in the light of Balibars discussion of Marxs recourse to the French word ensemble in the theses on feuerbach, adornos own use of this word in this notably emphatic articulation of the form of negative dialectics takes on a resonance that draws parallels between the nonessentialist interests of both Balibar and adorno. Commenting on Marxs sentence, Balibar speculates that Marx used the foreign word ensemble to avoid using the German Das Ganze, the whole or totality, in order to stress that his concept of essence is purely constituted through its rela-tions, without any appeal to a superconcept [see Balibar 30]. this directly corresponds to adornos interests and may serve as an explanation of his own use of the term ensemble here as a synonym for constellation. 9. See adornos early essay the actuality of Philosophy. 10. Phenomena do not, however, enter into the realm of ideas whole, in their crude empirical state, adulterated by appearances, but only in their basic elements, redeemed. they are divested of their false unity so that, thus divided, they might partake of the genuine unity of truth. in this their division, phenomena are subordinate to concepts, for it is the latter which effect the resolution of

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constellations reveal an order that is not immediately present in the individual starsand therefore not immediately reducible to the individual stars, but which nonetheless pres-ents the total context in which these stars standanalogously, ideas present the relation of objects to truth that is not immediately present in their appearance. Benjamins conception of constellations attempts to characterize the order of ideas as an order of truth in the quasi-Platonic sense of a timeless order of forms, essentially irreducible to their appearances within the world: The idea belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends [i.e. phenomena] [Origin 34/214]. Since the order of truth does not appear directly through the appearance of objects, which is subject to the finite conditions of experience, it cannot be judged relative to this order of conditions. As the objective order to which, finally, objects are subjected, the presentation of ideas is preoccupied with extremes or limits through which the absolute conditions of objects are indicated, rather than merely the average or normal conditions of the coher-ent experience of the appearance of objects. Ideas are not subjected to the coherence or unity of personal or subjective experience; subjective experience is ultimately subjected to ideas. Ideas are simply given to be reflected upon, as pre-existent and timeless:

ideas 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; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit from phenomena are most clearly evident at the extremes. the idea is best un-derstood as the representation of the context within which the unique and ex-treme stands alongside its counterpart. [34/214]

This conception of the constellationary form of ideas is understood by the early, theologi-cally minded Benjamin to be a result of their sacred characterwhich he associates with an Adam-like act of naminginsofar as they intend to present not merely the coherence of an experience but what something is absolutely. The task of philosophy is therefore to renew this namelike or symbolic quality of ideas, which is obscured by its subjection to the conditions of finite (secular) experience.11 Benjamins analysis of allegory in the Ba-roque mourning play can therefore be understood as a specifically philosophical task, in which allegories are understood as the secular, profane, or finite historical experience to which symbols have been subjected. Philosophizing is therefore the renewal of the presentation of ideas through the renewal of this symbolic dimension, recovering it from its dissolution into the conditions of finite experience:

the idea is something linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of the word. in empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvi-ous profane meaning. it is the task of the philosopher to restore, by presentation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness. . . . [36/216]

objects into their constituent elements. Conceptual distinctions are above all suspicion of sophistry only when their purpose is the salvation of phenomena in ideas. . . . through their mediating role concepts enable phenomena to participate in the existence of ideas [Origin 21314/33]. 11. adams action of naming things is so far removed from play or caprice that it actually confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the com-municative significance of words. Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation [37/217].

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Adornos reception of Benjamins notion of philosophical presentation is profound but critical. As such it involves considerable ambiguity. Explicitly, it takes place through a dialectical transformation of Benjamins antisystematic presentation of ideas. Ultimately, it is an attempt to salvage Benjamins conception of constellation from its latent dogma-tism in the appeal to the namelike quality of ideas, whether in the sacred form of his early texts or in the profane form of his later, materialist texts. Adornos approach is through an emphasis on the negative presentation of ideas through constellations of dialectical concepts. Referring to a letter in which Benjamin professes that his arcades Project was only presentable in a form that was an impermissible, poetic one, Adorno writes:

Benjamins defeatism about his own thought was conditioned by the undialecti-cal positivity of which he carried a formally unchanged remnant from his theo-logical phase to his materialistic phase. By comparison, Hegels equating nega-tivity with the thought that keeps philosophy from both the positivity of science and the contingency of dilettantism has experiential substance. thought as such, before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it. . . . [negative Dialectics 19, 2930]

This negative dimension reveals an alternative relation to ideas that is suppressed by the insistence on the given, preexistent, and timeless character of the name or word. Adorno proposes that philosophizing should present ideas (models) only negatively, through the presentation of constellations of concepts alone. It is the attempt to conceal this negative relation through insistence on the namelike quality of concepts that leads to dogmatism: Benjamins concepts still tend to an authoritarian concealment of their conceptuality. Concepts alone can achieve what the concept prevents [53/62]. This underpins Adornos famous criticisms of the later Benjamins presentation of his arcades Project in The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire:

. . . the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to turn into a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. if one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. that spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spellyour own resolute, salutary speculative theory. [Letter 12930]

Adorno diagnoses this oscillation between mysticism and positivism as a result of a lack of mediation between concept and idea, fact and truth; a lack of the negative labor of conceptualization [Letter 128]. Benjamins response to Adornos criticismsappealing to construction alone as an antidote to esotericism12emphasizes the disjunctive rela-tion between the form of presentation and the ideas themselves. It is as such that in both his early and later work Benjamin insists on a negative presentation of ideas. However, the force of Adornos criticism is that this negativity is not mediated, in the sense that there is no determinate relation between concepts and ideashence there tends to be a collapse or short-circuit between them. In order to prevent this problem, Adorno insists on philosophizing through determinate negations without positivization. This is also an attempt to avoid returning to Hegel, since Benjamins lack of mediation is certainly justi-fied insofar as it is mediation in Hegel that determines, and thereby overcomes, the nega-

12. I believe that speculation can start its necessary bold flight with some prospect of success only if, instead of putting on the waxen wings of the esoteric, it seeks its source of strength in con-struction alone. it is because of the needs of construction that the second part of my book consists primarily of philological material [Benjamin, Letter 136].

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tive relation of concepts to ideas. This issue is at the heart of the speculative philosophy that Adornos negative dialectics attempts to wrest from both Benjamin and Hegel. As a consequence of this criticism, Benjamins account of allegoryas the decay of symbols into finite, historical, and mimetic formstakes on greater significance for Adornos conception of philosophical form. In contrast to symbols, in which the mimetic quality of the sign is a direct obstacle to its symbolic capacity, tying it down to the con-tent of a form that is incidental to its meaning, allegories present ideas through images in which meaning and form are deeply entwined in an expressive or mimetic relation. Allegories therefore involve an insistence on the particularity of their expression that is absent from the symbol. Philosophical or dialectical concepts are, for Adorno, allegorical. They do not function like symbols, in the sense that their signification transcends form. Rather, like allegories, dialectical concepts are, for Adorno, bound to the experience of the nonidenticalof what they attempt to conceptualizethrough the particularity of their form, their linguistic medium. The expressive power they have is generated through their limitation to this form. Their inadequacy makes them combine into configurations or constellations through which they can make good on their insufficiency.

Constellation versus Sublation

Adornos negative dialectics is generated by a Benjaminian critique of Hegel as much as a Hegelian critique of Benjamin. Adornos attempt to philosophize through determi-nate negations alone, without positivization, is achieved by replacing sublation with con-stellation as the form of dialectical mediation. Constellations present an alternative form of unity to the progressive unfolding of the speculative concept developed by Hegels conception of sublation, without thereby resorting to a merely formal or nominal clas-sification. According to Hegel, to sublate (aufheben) should be understood in the two-fold sense of to preserve and to dissolve [Science 107/114]. This is fundamental to his speculative logic whereby the erroneous or negative aspect of a concepts relation to the nonconceptual reveals a determinacy that, once recognized, corrects the initial error of the concept, negating its negativity, and enabling a positive identity between concept and conceptualized. Adornos negative dialectics is premised on the critique of the idealism of this positivization of determinate negation. Gillian Rose has described Adornos cri-tique of Hegelian speculation as leading from Hegels speculative propositions to chiastic propositions, in which the horizon of reconciliation is blocked by skepticism:

in Dialectic of Enlightenment, adorno and Horkheimer develop an account of domination which owes its credentials to a nietzscheanism itself reduced from speculative to chiastic propositions which elaborate the main thesis: myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology. [59]

But, if Adorno does not propose a speculative sublation of determinate negation, nor does he propose skepticism. The chiastic dimension of his language is necessary for the disjunctive experience of negativity, which is essential to his conception of speculative thought. This is saved from skepticism by an alternative form of unity to that provided by Hegelian speculation: constellations. They present not a sublation of determinate nega-tion, but a configuration of determinate negations. Simon Jarvis has suggested that these should be regarded, in distinction from Hegels speculative propositions, as speculative differentiations, which negatively invoke a speculative experience of something beyond the choices that frame the present:

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Life without self-preservation, reconciliation without sacrifice, happiness with-out power: these as yet barely imaginable differentiations are no less specula-tively thought by Adorno than is the identification of the real and rational by Hegel. these are adornos speculative differentiations to Hegels speculative identifications. They are not propositionsthey have no copula and no main verbbut are negatively articulated by constellations of propositions. [230]

Constellations are not progressive but combinative: a nonprogressive combination. That is to say, constellations combine concepts in order to illuminate the nonconceptual through a process of accumulation that aspires to increasing concretion, but which cannot claim that this process is progressive, inasmuch as it is not achieved through the negation of negation but rather through a combination of negations. The configuration of concepts therefore does not present itself as a progressively sufficient identification of the object. This is how constellation provides unity without sublation:

the unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. it survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover con-cept. instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. [Adorno, negative Dialec-tics 162/164]

The model is one of affinity rather than identification: the generation of a likeness that resembles the object, but without mistaking that likeness for the object itself. In this self-conscious illusion Adornos dialectics meets aesthetics. The configuration of concepts attempts to generate an image or intuition of the nonconceptual, not through the immedi-ate intuition of the object in the concept, but through configuring the mimetic qualities submerged in its linguistic medium, in such a way that the nonconceptual is imaged nega-tively, revealing it as neither identical with the concept nor merely the negation of the negation of the concept. This is the essentially linguistic exertion of philosophical presen-tation. Constellations linguistically dissolve the principle of identity: as such, they form something other than the concepts or identifications from which they are composed.

essay

Adorno identifies the essay as a privileged form of philosophizing. The essay effective-ly provides an alternative characterization of the form of models. This view is explicit from Adornos earliest appropriation of Benjamin to his later reflections on the essay as form.13 It is also apparent from the essaylike character taken by Adornos models. His re-flections on the form of the essay therefore offer further clarifications of his conception of the form of philosophy. But to understand the essay as simply a genre of philosophizing through models risks tying it to the fate of a presupposed form, and therefore precisely what the task of philosophizing, as an essentially critical activity, must question. In its antipathy to fulfilling a prescribed role, the essay, for Adorno, is a form of intellectual freedom linked with the emergence and fate of the Enlightenment. This indeterminacy generates its critical relation to the intellectual division of labor, as a form that does not correspond to the division between science and art. It does not immediately reconcile this division, which Adorno considers a utopian or regressive ambition. It is a hybrid form, in

13. Both thought and history come into communication within the models. regarding efforts to achieve a form for such communication, i gladly put up with the reproach of essayism [adorno, the actuality of Philosophy 132/343]. See also adorno, the essay as Form.

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which the fetishized division of science and art is brought to critical self-reflection. Cor-responding to his principal morphological objection to the concept of system as closed and self-sufficient or autonomous, Adornos concept of the essay is as an incomplete form, which is both open and free in the sense that it is neither prescribed nor prescrip-tive in its constitution. The essay involves the articulation of a relation of elements that is binding, but without being exhaustive or exclusive. Its insubstantiality, as a contin-gent, mortgaged, and experimental form, inherently abandons the deductive or inductive completion of a system as self-identical. For Adorno, the essay is not defined by the at-tempt to establish first principles or origins, or exhaustive ends. It thereby remains true to the nonidentity of the concepts it combines and the objects it refers to: Because the unbroken order of concepts is not equivalent to what exists, the essay does not aim at a closed deductive or inductive structure.14 the essay articulates received elements in their emergence and develops them as such without seeking to ground or foreclose them com-pletely, or in such a way that would arrest their process of becoming. The essay hereby manifests the processual transformation of traditional philosophical conceptions of truth. Adornos reception of this transformation from Hegel is developed into an immanent critique of Hegels retention of the form of system. The essay proves itself to be a more radically processual form, uncircumscribed by claims to origin or end. This determines its relation to totality. It does not posit totality, as does Hegels conception of system, but presents the attempt to develop a dialectical logic in which the speculative appeal to totality would remain negative: The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without assert-ing the presence of the totality [Essay 16/25]. The essay has the paradoxical form of a totality that is not a total: [The essays] totality, the unity of a form developed imma-nently, is that of something not total, a totality that does not maintain as form the thesis of the identity of thought and its object that it rejects as content [17/26]. Its ambivalent presentation of totality differentiates it from the form of the masterpiece or other forms of totalized creation. The critique of Hegel induced by the essays form extends to the contradictory relation of dialectics to its methodologya criticism Adorno makes self-reflectively inasmuch as he is discussing the methodology of the essay:

idealist philosophy, to be sure, suffered from the inconsistency of criticizing an abstract overarching concept, a mere result, in the name of process, which is inherently discontinuous, while at the same time talking about dialectical meth-od in the manner of idealism. For this reason the essay is more dialectical than the dialectic is when the latter discourses on itself. the essay takes Hegelian logic at its word: the truth of the totality cannot be played off against individual judgements. Nor can truth be made finite in the form of an individual judgement; instead, singularitys claim to truth is taken literally, up to the point where its untruth becomes evident. [19/2728]

Consistent with the abandonment of rationalist deduction, Adorno makes clear that the essay rejects definition of its concepts. To compensate, it relies on the determinateness of its presentation. The meaning of concepts is not established once and for all, but relative to the process by which they are arranged, a process that does not just indicate or refer but composes something of the historical process through which its meaning is established.

14. adorno, the essay as Form 10/17. this antisystemic critique is extended to the implic-itly systemic aspects of empiricism: even empiricist theories, which give priority to experience that is open-ended and cannot be anticipated, as opposed to fixed conceptual ordering, remain systematic in that they deal with preconditions for knowledge that are conceived as more or less constant and develop them in as homogeneous a context as possible [essay 9/1617].

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Because the essay cannot rely on the clarity of its definitions for precision, it is forced to compensate by the precision of its presentation of its elements, its choice and arrange-ment of concepts. This accounts for the necessary density of the essay form, which is so evident in Adornos own writing. This emphasis on presentation generates a quality of closedness immanent to its openness, which produces an alternative to the closed form of system:

The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like. It is more open in that its structure negates system, and it satisfies its inher-ent requirements better the more rigorously it holds to that negation. . . . But the essay is also more closed, because it works emphatically at the form of its pre-sentation. Consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject matter forces presentation to unremitting efforts. [1718/26]

This is the labor of presentation that results from philosophizing without origins or ends.

Fragments

It is notable that Adornos critique of system appeals explicitly to a concept of the frag-ment.15 Adorno produces very few reflections on the historical derivation of this form and, despite his debt to Benjamin, rarely discusses its specificity to early German Roman-ticism. But, regardless of biographical influence, Adornos critique of system in many re-spects reproduces the Romantics formation of the fragment. This inheritance takes place through the essay. If the fragment is the primary form of Romanticism, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have argued, it is nonetheless derived explicitly from the various genres devel-oped by the French and English moralistssuch as Montaigne, Chamfort, and Shaftes-buryamongst which the essay is also central [see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 3958]. It should therefore come as no surprise that we can diagnose Adornos reception of the fragment as a form of philosophizing through his understanding of the essay.16 The originality of the Romantic fragment is achieved through the emphasis on its essential incompleteness, and the insistence on this incompleteness as the essential con-dition for the presentation of the absolute. Each fragment presents the absolute, but in-completely. Fragments are therefore not just parts or sections, in which the totality is

15. The categories of a critique of systems are at the same time the categories in which the particular is understood. What has once legitimately transcended particularity in the system has its place outside the system. The interpretative eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it isand solely because of what it issecularises metaphysics. Only fragments as the form of philosophy would give their proper place to the monads, those illusory idealistic drafts. They would be concep-tions in the particular of the totality that is inconceivable as such [Adorno, Negative Dialectics 28/3940]. 16. Indeed, one of Adornos rare references to the Romantic conception of the fragment is introduced as part of the elaboration of the essay: If the essay opposes, aesthetically, the mean-spirited method whose sole concern is not to leave anything out, it is following an epistemological impulse. The romantic conception of the fragment [Fragment] as a construction that is not com-plete but rather progresses onward into the infinite through self-reflection champions this anti-ide-alist motive in the midst of Idealism. Even in the manner of its presentation, the essay may not act as though it had deduced its object and there was nothing left to say about it. Its self-relativization is inherent in its form: it has to be constructed as though it could always break off at any point. It thinks in fragments [Brchen], just as reality is fragmentary [brchig], and finds its unity in and through the breaks [Brche] and not by glossing over them [Adorno, Essay 16/2425].

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presented in exclusive particles, like the discreet pieces of a jigsaw. This incompleteness therefore requires and projects further supplementation. This takes place, not through a superconcept or the addition of that missing piece of the fragment, but through further fragments. The absolute is therefore presented through a combination of fragments, each relating to every other through its fundamentally incomplete presentation of its essence, the absolute. The system that this combination of fragments generates is therefore an in-finite process of reflection. Each fragment reflects each other, generating a systematic in-terrelation of reflections as a consequence of the incompleteness that binds them together. The abbreviated length of the fragment does not therefore distinguish it completely from the extended length of the essay. The essays extended length can be seen as an extension and intensification of this process of reflection, just as Friedrich Schlegel presented only fragments, in the plural. And this can be understood as not only internal to one essay, but also in an essays relation to other essays, and so on to the composition of larger texts. This is Adornos understanding:

the essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality. it corrects what is contingent and isolated in its insights in that they multiply, confirm, and disqualify themselves, whether in the further course of the essay itself or in the mosaic-like relationship to other essays, but not by a process of abstraction that ends in characteristic features derived from them. [Essay 1617/2425]

Thus, we can think of this fragmentary principle as the basis of Adornos book-length works. Inasmuch as each fragment presents the absolute, but incompletely, the essential law of their interrelation is that each is equally close to the center. Adorno employs the same principle of composition in aesthetic theory:

From my theorem that there is no philosophical first principle, it now also re-sults that one cannot build an argumentative structure that follows the usual progressive succession of steps, but rather that one must assemble the whole out of a series of partial complexes that are, so to speak, of equal weight and concentrically arranged all on the same level; their constellation, not their suc-cession, must yield the idea. [364/541]

The essential incompleteness of fragments departs from the dogmatic form of the system as a hierarchical structure. Moreover, it departs from the principle of self-sufficiency and completeness that is still, albeit problematically, retained by Kants organic concept of system. This establishes the fundamental significance of the fragment as a form of Ador-nos philosophizing. It also provides a prototype for the peculiarly ambivalent attitude Adorno has toward the concept of system. The Romantics retain the ideal of the system as the form of presentation, but structure it through an essentially processual, open, and nonself-sufficientthat is, fragmentaryapprehension of the absolute. This under-standing avoids the reduction of the absolute into the preestablished form of the system. Rather than apprehending the absolute in terms of a system, the system is apprehended in terms of the absolute. As Benjamin notably pointed out: Rather than attempting to grasp the absolute systematically . . . [Friedrich Schlegel] sought conversely to grasp the system absolutely [Concept 138]. The Romantics therefore extend Kants critique of dogmatism to the critique of the concept of system itself, as a discourse on method, and in the process break more radically with Descartess axiomatization. It is in this respect that Adornos concept of the essay inherits the historic transformation of the presentation

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of philosophy proposed by Romanticism, and develops it against the idealist tendencies within Romanticism itself. Indeed, Adornos The Essay as Form is partly structured by a point-by-point critique of Descartess rules of method.17 Dogmatisms task of definition is fragmented and replaced by fragmentation.

a new Dictionnaire philosophique

In an attempt to articulate his critique of system in negative Dialectics, Adorno cites Jean Le Rond DAlemberts distinction between espirit de systme and espirit systmatique. He sees DAlemberts proposal of systematic spirit as the method of the encyclopdie, as anticipating the critique of system that he is proposing, one that leads from the system to the open realm of definition by individual moments.18 this unreferenced allusion is to dAlemberts Preliminary Discourse to the encyclopaedia of Diderot [esp. 2223]. It deserves investigation since it reveals a resonant, if largely subterranean, heritage to Adornos concept of philosophical form and its peculiar inflection of the Romantic frag-ment. DAlemberts distinction between spirit of the system and systematic spirit is textually obscure, especially when thought in terms of Adornos appropriation. It is pro-duced as a critique of axiomatic definition, derived ostensibly from Descartess Discourse on Method, but in a form that is distinct from that proposed by Adorno. DAlemberts concern is with the establishment of principles that will enable the most simple or re-duced expression of the unity of the objects of science. Howeverand here is where Adornos interest can be detectedDAlemberts concern is for these principles to en-able the greatest richness in their application. He finds this expansiveness, ironically perhaps, in the very reduction of the principles: the more one reduces the number of principles of a science the more one gives them scope, and since the object of a science is necessarily fixed, the principles applied to that object will be so much more fertile as they are fewer in number [22]. DAlemberts distinction emphasizes the openness and richness that is enabled by this systematic spiritsomething he marks by refer-ring to the true systematic spiritas opposed to a reification of the system as a closed and constrictive apprehension of objects, the spirit of the system. Thus, rather than the system (of principles) being the spirit, the spirit is to be approached through them, systematically. This corresponds to Adornos contention that Encyclopaedic thinking [Denken als enzyklopdie]rationally organised and yet discontinuous, unsystematic, looseexpressed the self-critical spirit of reason [negative Dialectics 29/3940]. It is a thinking that Adorno interprets Romantically, as a ruin, falling from the destruction of its original form within Enlightenment rationalism, but thereby transformed as a new pos-sibility released through this destruction.

17. the essay gently challenges the ideal of clara et distincta perceptio and indubitable cer-tainty. altogether, [the essay] might be interpreted as a protest against the four rules established by Descartess discourse on method at the beginning of modern western science and its theory [adorno, essay 14/22]. 18. Speaking for the espirit systmatique is not only the trivial motive of a cohesion that will tend to crystallize in the incoherent anyway; it does not only satisfy the bureaucrats desire to stuff all things into their categories. the form of the system is adequate to the world, whose substance eludes the hegemony of the human thought; but unity and unanimity are at the same time an oblique projection of pacified, no longer antagonistic conditions upon the coordinates of supremacist, op-pressive thinking. the double meaning of philosophical systematics leaves no choice but to trans-pose the power of thought, once delivered from the systems, into the open realm of definition by individual moments [adorno, Negative Dialectics 2425/35].

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The significance of the project of the encyclopaedia for Adornos concept of philo-sophical form has further implications. DAlemberts articulation of the relation of prin-ciples to their further elaboration grounds a distinction between philosophy and the ency-clopedia itself. Philosophy corresponds to the principal branches of that part of human knowledge which consists either in the direct ideas which we have received through our senses, or in the combination or comparison of these ideas [36]; whereas the encyclo-paedia consists of the infinite subdivision of these branches. This distinction grounds two aims within the presentation of the encyclopaedia: the encyclopaedia itself and, corresponding to its philosophical dimension, a Reasoned Dictionary.19 this distinction between the forms of the encyclopaedia and the dictionary suggests a precursor to the form of the combination of philosophical texts that Adorno intended above and beyond the level of any particular text. As he writes in his introduction to a volume of essays called Catchwords:

the title Catchwords [Stichworte] alludes to the encyclopaedic form that, unsys-tematically, discontinuously, presents what the unity of experience crystallizes into a constellation. thus the technique of a small volume with somewhat arbi-trarily chosen catchwords perhaps might make conceivable a new dictionnaire philosophique. [Critical Models 126/598]

Adornos suggestion of a new philosophical dictionary appears to register the distinction that DAlembert makes above, insofar as it concerns the presentation of principles that al-low further encyclopaedic elaboration. This impression is deepened once we note both the correspondence between model and idea and the fact that Catchwords is one part of a three-volume series of critical models.20 It therefore seems that Adornos understanding of the relationship of philosophy to empirical science, which has so perplexed commenta-tors, may well be understood in terms of this relation of a philosophical dictionary to an encyclopaedia: as the generation of a combination of models or ideas, which, in a discon-tinuous, open-ended form, present the principles for the development and elaboration of further research. This correspondence has further resonances. Like the French Encyclo-paedists, Adorno largely understood his work as part of an inherently collective project, most directly through the institutional structures and projects of the Frankfurt School. The collective project of an interdisciplinary materialism, diagnosed in Horkheimers early directorship of the Institute for Social Research, can therefore be interpreted as in-herent in Adornos conception of philosophy and its form. Furthermore, like the French Encyclopaedists, the Frankfurt School conducted their expansive intellectual programa theory of society as a social totalityas an explicitly politicized project.

19. the work [i.e. the Encyclopaedia] whose first volume we are presenting today has two aims. as an Encyclopaedia, it is to set forth as well as possible the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge. as a reasoned dictionary of the sciences, Arts and trades, it is to contain the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each [4]. this should perhaps be understood as the model for Voltaires Philosophical Dictionary. 20. these kritische modelle make up the above-cited volume, as its title suggests. as theo-dore Besterman comments, with remarkable resonance, in his introduction to the translation of Voltaires Dictionnaire philosophique: the Dictionnaire philosophique is not what we now un-derstand by a dictionary, least of all a dictionary of philosophy, for its alphabetical arrangement is little more than a literary trompe loeil. this epoch making little book is in fact a series of es-says on a wide variety of subjects, sometimes arranged under convenient headings in alphabetical sequence, but sometimes placed under deliberately misleading or even provocative catchwords [5].

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But Adornos critical salvation of encyclopaedic thinking as a ruin, generated out of the decay of the French Enlightenment, should be understood as inflected by Romanticism not just as a characterization of the form of its reception but more substantively. The con-nection between the Jena Romantics and the Encyclopaedists seems to have been direct, through the reception of Diderots philology as exemplary of the fragmentary experience of Antiquity.21 The Romantics also employed collective practices of writing as part of a simultaneously intellectual and political project. This comparison is equally informative in the differences it exposes. The Romantics sought to radically depart from the Cartesian principle of method, which is only tentatively modified by the Encyclopaedists. Adorno stressed this departure. It is compounded when we think of the alternative that Adornos intimation of an antisystematic encyclopaedia presents to the systematic encyclopaedia of Hegel, his encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Hegels understanding of the concept of encyclopaedia is not developed on the basis of a Cartesian concept of system, derived through axiomatic principles but, following Kant and Romanticism, through a discursive, processual, and organic concept of system developed through a self-correct-ing process of speculative reasoning. Hegel characterizes it in relation to a concept of philosophy but, in certain respects, inverts the relation proposed by DAlembert. For Hegel, the encyclopaedia is understood as an introductory aid, which is restricted to the beginnings and fundamental concepts of the particular sciences [encyclopaedia 39]; it is incomplete and therefore inferior to the full elaboration of philosophy. But he also makes a notable distinction between his philosophical encyclopaedia and the ordinary encyclopaedia. The ordinary encyclopaedia presents merely an aggregate of the sciences, as an arbitrary and externally imposed order, whereas the philosophical en-cyclopaedia presents the sciences as an essential unity, derived from the perspective that they finally present one, unified science [3940]. It is notable that Hegel refers to each particular science as a part that realizes itself with the realization of absolute knowledge. Like the Romantic fragment, the particular science is understood to involve an apprehen-sion of the absolute intensified within it. But, unlike the fragment, the process of realizing a sciences relation to the absolute is not interminable. Adorno does not aspire to a total philosophy, as Hegel did. He nevertheless seeks to renew the freedom of philosophizing from the constraints of the division of intellectual labor that results from the decay of systematic philosophy into alienated sciences and disciplines. His philosophizing, from the level of the individual word to the organiza-tion of larger combinations of texts, indicates a fragmentary form of presentation com-posed through the open-ended, discursive constellation of models or essays. Axiomatic definition gives way to essayism, and fragmentarily related essays replace definitions in Adornos new philosophical dictionary. The presentation of philosophy takes the form of a dictionary of models.

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