CHAPTER THREE

The Inheritance of the Constellation: Adorno and Hegel

Adorno’s singular ways of inhabiting a tradition and of being simultaneously at odds with that same tradition are inextricably intertwined with his complex inheritance of Hegelian thought.¹ In fact, his ways of casting an uncoercive gaze upon the objects of his critical inquiry cannot be thought in separation from his abiding engagement with the movements of thought that he encounters in the Hegelian tradition. For Adorno, as for other members of the early Frankfurt School, the challenge presented by Hegel’s legacy is second to none in the way it has left its mark on the thinking of modernity as such. Indeed, Hegel’s remarkable example in particular allows a number of the foundational difficulties of an intellectual inheritance, difficulties that also are crucial to Adorno’s own singularity of thinking, to emerge in vivid relief. Yet our considerations of Adorno’s uneasy inheritance of Hegelian modes of thought will not revolve primarily around the manifold consequences of Hegelian thought, nor will they involve a study of his reception that would retrace the determinate influences that Hegel exercised upon subsequent thinking. Nor is it a question here of inquiring into Hegel’s legacy from a point of view that would discern, to speak with the Italian interpreter of Hegel Benedetto Croce, what still “lives” and what is “dead” in Hegel’s philosophy. Not even the most consequential mainstream currents of the Hegelian heritage will be foregrounded—that is, neither right-leaning conservative Hegelians of the nineteenth century such as Eduard Gans and, later, Kuno Fischer, nor left-wing Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauß; neither Hegel’s materialist legacy through Marx, nor the critical delimitations of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, nor the influential later adoption of Hegel in France through Alexandre Kojève; neither Ernst Bloch’s utopia-oriented inheritance of Hegel, nor the latest onset of approaches to reading Hegel that began to make their mark in the second half of the twentieth century and that today—in the age of globally operating neoliberalism and capital-oriented pragmatism—are often associated, rightly or not, with names such as Charles Taylor. Even three of the most provocative and circumspect reassessments of Hegel of recent years will be bracketed, namely, those of Catherine Malabou, Rebecca Comay, and Slavoj Žižek, whose inheritances of Hegel would each deserve reflections and responses in their own right.² Nor will further additions be made to the existing interpretations of Hegel, which span over two centuries and, in the meantime, fill whole reading rooms—even if, at one point or another, an unexpected perspective on Hegel may happen to open up in the course of our reflections. After all, in following Hegel we in a certain sense constantly interpret him anew, whether or not he is expressly thematized, whether or not we intend to do so, indeed, whether or not we know it.

Instead, consciously narrowing in on the concept of inheritance as it is mediated for Adorno through Hegel should make a paradigmatic attempt at inheriting graspable, one that attempts in an idiomatic way to render, through a radical interpretation, Hegel’s legacy generative for an uncoercive thinking, which in turn left its decisive mark on the canon of modern theoretical formation: Adorno’s negatively dialectical modes of reflection. In the center of interest stands Hegel’s early masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which shaped modern engagements with dialectical thinking as well as modern philosophical thought as such. The following reading of Adorno’s attempt to “inherit” Hegel advances the thesis that every inheriting—which also is to say, every inheritance of an uncoercive gaze—takes place in and as language, and that a responsible appropriation of an intellectual legacy must develop a theory of reading that not only interprets the text to be inherited but also at the same time questions its proper assumptions and unspoken presuppositions. It therefore always (and thus, by extension, already in a Hegelian sense) must be a theory of the proper and the other—and thus a theory of the proper as the other and the other as the proper—just as much as it must make an attempt to delineate sharply the relation between the proper and the other, the one who inherits and that which is to be inherited, interpretation and legacy.

Before we turn to Adorno’s particular inheritance of Hegel, however, we need to fasten more closely on the principal notion of inheriting Hegel in modern thinking. Here, several thoughts of Heidegger’s former student Hans-Georg Gadamer provide some preliminary help. In his 1979 Stuttgart lecture, “The Heritage of Hegel,” which he held upon receiving the Hegel Prize, Gadamer writes in answer to the question he poses himself, namely, how the legacy of Hegel is at work in his own thinking:

No one should take upon himself the task of measuring all that has come down to us in the great heritage of Hegelian thought. It should be enough for each person to be the heritage oneself and to give account of what one has received from this inheritance . . . . Moreover, no one should imagine himself able to reap the harvest of an entire epoch, or indeed even merely to assess it . . . . Hegel knew better when he—ultimately to be sure in regard to himself as well—cited the following: “See, the feet of those who are going to take you away are already standing in front of the door.”³

Here, Gadamer cites a passage from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy that itself adapts a citation from the fifth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which concerns, according to Hegel, the “indication of the nullity of philosophical knowledge through the history of philosophy itself.”⁴ If one follows this line of thinking, it becomes clear that Hegel cannot be inherited as such, as a final authoritative instance that is simply at our disposal and that allows the tradition from which he stems and which he decisively influenced to appear as a storehouse from which one might arbitrarily draw in the service of undergirding one’s prefabricated views. To the contrary, inheriting Hegel means to give an account—not before a court of law, but before the reading and thinking “I.” To hold oneself accountable in this way also means, however, to assess one’s debts to Hegel’s legacy and, interpreting on the basis of this assessment, to think a relation to Hegelian language itself, without which his movements of thinking—both their disclosures and their immensities—could hardly be captured. If Gadamer cites Hegel’s citation from the Acts of the Apostles, then this gesture should, especially in the context of the question of interpretative inheritance, be associated with the quasi-dialectical tenet that the feet of the heirs who stand before the door can inherit responsibly as well as irresponsibly, that they may be unable to wait to proceed with what is left behind in an already predetermined way or that they may be willing to learn to inherit by reading and thinking.

This process of inheriting and learning always bears on the simultaneous experience of the inevitability and inadequacy of linguistically mediated thinking. If, as Gadamer reminds us in his Hegel Prize speech, “Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” have “exposed limits to the self-certitude of thought thinking itself,” then “it is not a matter of becoming Hegel’s successor, but rather of interiorizing the exactions that he presents,”⁵ and thereby, too, a matter of the “use that language finds in us whenever we think,” a language that does not represent a mere instrument for understanding but that “pervades our whole experience of the world.”⁶ To inherit Hegel’s legacy would demand of us, then, that we pose ever anew the question of the linguistic or textual character of this inheritance, each time from the perspective of changing points of view. “In the linguistic character of our access to the world,” as Gadamer puts it,

we find ourselves placed in the process of tradition that marks us as historical in essence. Language is not . . . a tool that we apply, but the element in which we live and that we can never so objectify that it ceases to surround us . . . . The element of language is not merely an empty medium in which one thing or another might be encountered. No, it is the quintessence of everything that can encounter us at all . . . . But since it surrounds us as what is spoken and not as a threatening field of otherness in relation to which there can only be self-affirmation, victory, or submission, language shapes the space of our freedom.⁷

What Gadamer associates with the heritage of Hegel is its irreducibly linguistic character, its mediation in and as language, which is considered here in the broadest sense as the relational nexus that both promises and postpones meaning, which not only unconceals world but is world. The question of whether and to what extent there can be a concept of freedom in this world, this questionable possibility and the associated notions and experiences of what can be tenable as freedom and therefore, too, as unfreedom, is what the legacy of language passes down to us.

If “Hegel’s heritage will not set us free,”⁸ we will not be able, for all our critique of metaphysics, to sever ourselves from the truth claims of his metaphysics—which critique would itself have to rest unconsciously on metaphysical assumptions. Instead, the claim holds true that Hegel’s quasi-orphaned legacies would have to be interpreted anew, for the legacies he left behind will always appear orphaned when they are not subjected to a new rereading that radically places all that has been said in question and when they thereby threaten to perish as allegedly known matters, as dogma, as supposedly stable meaning and hermeneutic routine. Gadamer, for his part, expresses this state of affairs as follows:

Precisely therein does it make sense to see oneself an heir of Hegel—not by thinking his anticipation of the absolute as a knowledge that we entrust to philosophy; still less by expecting philosophy to serve the demands of the day and to legitimate any authority that pretends to know what the moment requires. It suffices to acknowledge with Hegel the dialectic of the universal and concrete as the summation of the whole of metaphysics until now, and along with this to realize that this has to be summed up ever anew.⁹

But if this is the case, then the concept of the absolute, of what has ab- or dissolved (absolvere) itself from all that is contingent, is not absolute in the sense that knowledge would have come to a limit or to a resolved closure. On the contrary, it could be affirmed: The absolute that the young Hegel’s Phenomenology so systematically works to make thinkable is no telos, no end goal of static knowledge that could be reached; rather, the Hegelian absolute catalyzes in its own right the thinking inception of something wholly other, which would need to be understood and inherited, in turn. Hegel’s absolute knowledge would then be one name among others for absolute inheriting.

To speak about Hegel’s inheritance and the heirs of Hegel also means to read this heritage and these heirs in tension with a Hegelian utterance found in a text that was written, like the Phenomenology, during his time in Jena. In The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801), Hegel attempts to delimit his yet-to-be-developed thinking of absolute idealism from the critical idealism of Kant, the subjective idealism of Fichte, and the objective idealism of Schelling in order to take the next step toward thinking beyond not only Kant’s Copernican turn but also Fichte’s absolute “I” and intellectual intuition, as well as Schelling’s philosophy of nature, in which nature appears as solidified spirit. In the center stands the cautiously forward-thinking, slowly unfolding history of the dialectical movement of experience through which spirit can appear as absolute spirit. In the introductory section, “Various Forms Occurring in Contemporary Philosophy,” Hegel writes: “Because in philosophy reason comes to know itself and deals only with itself, its whole work and activity are grounded in itself, and with respect to the inner essence of philosophy there are neither predecessors nor successors.”¹⁰ Hegel’s way of seeing what is at issue here lies grounded in an understanding of thinking that, insofar as the concept of reason itself unfolds at its center, revolves first of all around itself and in so doing arrives at the knowledge that philosophical thinking names the place where reason has no business occupying itself primarily with this or that object, but rather with itself—its proper presuppositions, determinations, and limits. In this self-reflection of reason, philosophical thinking comes to itself, recognizing that it is its own proper object and that it can rigorously and dialectically go after its wishes to turn to other, external objects solely to the extent that it is prepared to turn toward itself. However greatly the so-called content of a philosophical thought process may differ—with its ever-changing objects and ever differently determined material conditions—at its kernel, thinking always revolves around a sort of critical self-dialogue of reason, which must give an account of its proper presuppositions and, as need be, its proper flaws, so that it can do justice in equal measure to that what is to be thought and to thinking itself. If, as Hegel maintains, the “whole work” of reason, as well as “its activity,” lies in this self-reflection, if it always essentially remains equal to itself, regardless of all the differences among its so-called applications, and if it therefore constantly remains itself each time as another, then reason may be reckoned as the proper essence of philosophical thinking for the version of absolute idealism that is being prepared here. Under these conditions and from this particular outlook, Hegel can affirm that there are, properly speaking, neither predecessors nor successors in philosophy. As opposed to the notions of pre-decessors and successors, what is at stake here is a thinking that cedes itself in the procedure of philosophy itself. For the process of thinking constantly leads back to itself, even if it can only ever be treated in its own way, each time in its properly deviant way, as it were. Thus, it would be just as inappropriate to designate the thinking of the Pre-Socratics the predecessor to classical Greek philosophy as it would be to call historical materialism the successor of Idealism.

Now, however, the question imposes itself as to how a Hegelian system of knowledge, which has ultimately contributed more to the modern historical sense and to the idea of historical argumentation than any other attempt at thinking them, interprets the historical association between philosophical notions and postulates. If, on the basis of reason’s abiding self-reflection—which itself pervades Western philosophical thinking—there are no philosophical predecessors and successors, as Hegel apodictically affirms, the following problem nevertheless remains to be confronted: the extent to which thinkers, especially when they expressly refer to one another in their writings, enter into a particular relation to one another that cannot be reduced to the biographical-historical model of influence, or that of preceding and succeeding. Even in bracketing succession, there is no way around the irreducible question of a legacy, of an inheritance, without which a thinking existence would hardly be imaginable.

From the points of view that occupy us here, it is therefore particularly provocative to bring back into focus the inheriting “successor” of a philosophical “predecessor” who maintains that there can be no predecessors and successors. For Adorno, the particular and heretical “heir” of Hegel around whom the following reflections will revolve in an exemplary fashion, attempts—partially successfully, partially in vain—to take on the orphaned legacy of this predecessor. And he seeks to do so in an idiomatic way, without becoming a mere follower or pursuing his proper course of thinking under the overarching concept of an after-phenomenon.

In surveying the ways that Adorno proceeds in order to appropriate the heritage of Hegel, the most direct way is, as is so often the case in thinking, the detour. Yet the detour to be taken here on the way to inheritance leads at first, surprisingly, to notions of the animal and animality. Of course, the pervasiveness of zoological motifs and animal names throughout Adorno’s experiential world has been recognized at least since the publication of his letters to his parents, in which pet names drawn from the animal realm arise frequently enough, such as hippopotamus, giraffe, gazelle, horse, or even “horsy.” Even on the postcard motifs selected by Adorno, giraffes and hippopotamuses resurface, while a group of toy giraffes sat enthroned upon his work desk during his Californian exile.¹¹ Decisively less foregrounded in the consciousness of his readers, however, is the fact that zoological figures and images assume strategic positions in his philosophical production as well.¹² Among the motifs of the section entitled “Improvisations” from Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music is a zoological garden that Adorno had visited as a child, which appears in a passage drafted in 1951. It is not only the animals that remain in Adorno’s memory of this zoo but also a certain musical pavilion, in which, at times, the members of so-called exotic tribes delivered presentations. “Whether it be the memory of this,” Adorno writes, “or simply the condensation of what has long been forgotten—even today, when I hear the kettledrum it brings back the memory of Tamasese, the tribal chief. And at the same time I recall that the heads of Tamasese’s prisoners were used as drums, or perhaps they were the cauldrons in which the savages cooked human flesh.”¹³ Adorno continues: “Is the drum the successor of human sacrifice, or does it still sound the command to kill? In our music it resounds as an archaic survival. It is the legacy of violence in art, the violence which lies at the base of all art’s order.”¹⁴ Wholly as if he were drawing subterranean parallels to Benjamin’s testimony that there is no document of culture that is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism, wholly as if he wanted to conjure associations, at the same time, with the connection Freud draws between foregone forms of civilization and the psychic apparatus of modern neurotics, and wholly as if he intended one more time—this time in an autobiographically mediated way—to integrate the leading motif of the Dialectic of Enlightenment that he had composed a few years earlier with Max Horkheimer into a more seemingly literary thought-image—the motif, namely of the imbrication of rational-progressive demystification and unwanted regress—Adorno here lends the problematic of inheritance a strategic expression. The particular inheritance that turns out to be pivotal here is the secret survival of inhuman domination in the guise of purported human freedom, the retreat of violence into the spiritualized realm of an art that nonetheless continues to exercise that very violence just below the threshold of consciousness. Over and above the particular spiritualizing and aestheticizing operations of art, however, Adorno’s language raises the foundational thematics of inheritance. And for both the particular inheritance of violence in art and the universal problem of inheritance as such, it would hold true that a responsible relation to them “keeps the consciousness of terror awake, the consciousness of all that can never be made good towards that which can no longer be made good.”¹⁵

If the gateways to the zoological garden that is represented here open onto Adorno’s entire writerly production, then the many-layered work of this thinker can be taken up as a series of attempts to give an account of his inheritance of the diverse representational and experiential worlds that preceded him at the conceptual, methodological, and political level. To this absolutely unrelenting engagement with the inheritance that conditions Adorno’s uncoercive gaze—a legacy that was constantly to be transgressed and undermined anew—belong, among others: the inheritance of the Enlightenment, German Idealism, historical materialism, modern art and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, the experience of anti-Semitism, the history of German music, the second Vienna School surrounding Schönberg, modern literature from Kafka to Beckett and Celan, the dialectic of culture and barbarism, as well as—fundamentally—life “after Auschwitz.” Readers of Adorno’s texts inevitably become witnesses to an ever-renewed attempt to do justice to an inheritance in all its complexity, even when this means radically placing it in question or even breaking with it. For Adorno, thinking means, precisely, to inherit. And learning to philosophize means learning to inherit, for the particular mode of inheriting that each new object renders incumbent upon conceptual and experiential thinking cannot be prescribed once and for all, as if it were an instance for the application of Cartesian method; rather, it requires that it be, with each new act of inheriting, questioned, and interpreted anew, in a word, that it be invented (and thus found and found out, er-funden).

When Adorno’s texts address the concept of inheritance explicitly, however, it is often associated with that which is not thought through, with the retrograde, the irritating, and even, at times, with the fascistic. In the most diverse contexts, he will write of inheritance as a “pre-critical substratum” or evoke the failed inheritance of Husserl, an inheritance of violence, the inheritance of a “planless monadological condition,” a problematic occidental inheritance of positivism, a false inheritance of tonality, the inheritance of unfreedom, the inheritance of totality as the legacy of ideology, the inheritance of fascist ideology, or an “inheritance of barbarically primitive tribal conceptions,”¹⁶ to name only a few examples. To put it more pointedly, a hard suspicion often arises for Adorno that inheritance is a particularly precarious way of thinking and relating: “in one Wild West show, for instance, a character says: when a large inheritance is at stake, villainy is not far behind.”¹⁷ Yet Adorno is thoroughly aware of the serious and constantly ambiguous demands of inheriting, as when he speaks of Alban Berg as an admired musician who “until the very end drew upon that inheritance and at the same time carried its burden, one that bowed his tall frame.”¹⁸ Precisely in the realm of aesthetics, the question of inheritance and inheriting poses itself for Adorno, for it is art, and especially music, that takes up a certain unanticipatable stance towards the scene of inheriting, which is conditioned by new possibilities and unspoken premises each time it presents itself. Accordingly, in a passage from the introduction to the Philosophy of New Music he solicits consideration for the way “the general social tendency—which has scorched from man’s consciousness and unconsciousness the humanity that once underlay the now-available musical resources—today only tolerates the arbitrary reiteration of the idea of humanity in the vacuous ceremonial of the concert hall, while the philosophical legacy of great music has devolved exclusively upon what scorns that heritage.”¹⁹ What is to be considered is the question of what an inheritance takes up and scorns, what it constantly seeks to hold at bay, and what nonetheless remains inscribed in it as a haunting, orphaned legacy.²⁰

Before the background of this general framework of inheritance, it is appropriate to recall that the irreducible question of how, precisely, Hegel’s thinking is to be inherited pervades the entire work of Adorno, second to none.²¹ The most elucidating recent literature on the relation of Adorno and Hegel reminds us that Adorno, even should one wish to call him a downright unorthodox Hegelian, practices a form of thinking that represents a Hegelianism after Hegel, a survival mode of dialectical thinking that thematizes the form which Hegelian concepts and representations assume when they are thought further, not only with Hegel, but also in the historical, epistemo-critical, and political successors that follow in his wake. And that always also means thinking through those concepts and representations after the disappointed revolutionary hopes of the Young Hegelians such as Marx, after the conceptual-critical interventions of Nietzsche, and, above all, after the Shoah.²² Over and beyond this, however, the question of Hegel’s inheritance always also requires consideration of the particular historical embeddedness of Hegelian thought. As Bloch remarks in his Jena speech, “Debate over Hegel,” “Only a genuine comrade of his time is there, too, for the time to come,”²³ so that solely the radical respect of a work for its particular contemporaneity could allow it to live on in the context of a wholly other contemporaneity. But when Adorno himself reflects upon his inheriting relation to Hegel, he is most concerned neither with retracing the determinate influences of Hegelian thinking upon his own polymorphous traces of thought, nor with gliding off into an all-too-pedantic account of himself with respect to the powerful foundational assumptions of the concepts Hegel shaped, such as system, spirit, or dialectic. To the contrary, in the spirit of the nonidentical thought-figures that Adorno draws in his negative dialectics, what stands in the foreground is how Hegel in particular is to be inherited, and how to inherit at an intellectual-creative level per se.²⁴

In his Three Studies on Hegel from 1963, three essays orbit around Hegel, “Aspects,” “Experiential Content,” and “Skoteinos, or How to Read,” forming a constellation in which Adorno charts the foundational difficulties that are inseparably intertwined with his purpose to inherit Hegel in a way that is neither imitatively proximating nor overbearingly distancing, neither mimetically repetitive nor chronically historicizing in terms of a history of ideas. For Adorno, this “arrogance echoes in the loathsome question of what in Kant, and now Hegel as well, has any meaning for the present—and already the so-called Hegel renaissance began half a century ago with a book by Benedetto Croce that undertook to distinguish between what was living and what was dead in Hegel.”²⁵ Thought should rather move, as it were, in the “opposite” direction: “The converse question is not even raised: what the present means in the face of Hegel; whether perhaps the reason one imagines one has attained since Hegel’s absolute reason has not in fact long since regressed behind the latter and accommodated to what merely exists, when Hegelian reason tried to set existence in motion through the reason that obtains even in what exists.”²⁶ If, in the realm of thinking opened by Hegel’s orphaned legacy, it is in no way a question of the extent to which it stands up against the supposedly more advanced thought-patterns of the day, as when a successor—donning the presumptuous judicial robe of his later birth—believes himself to be superior, and in a position to assign different grades to the different points of view he sees in Hegelian thought; if it is just as little a question of letting the proper particularity of Hegelian thinking disappear, like a grain of sand on the shore, through a logic of sweeping comparisons—then it would instead be a question of asking how our scene of inheriting would look before the gaze of Hegel, how we stand before the testator as his heirs with our questions, assumptions, and societal situations.

This strategic inversion of sightlines, however, can in no way turn into a simple appreciation on the basis of a more or less covert belief in authority, which would amount to confirming what is already established in any case, or bustling to conserve a precious spiritual-cultural heritage. To the contrary, all “appreciations are subject to the judgment passed in Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit on those are above something only because they are not in it. Appreciations fail from the start to capture the seriousness and cogency of Hegel’s philosophy by practicing on him what he called, with appropriate disdain, a philosophy of perspectives.”²⁷ From these circumstances it follows, in Adorno’s sense, that Hegel’s inheritance always demands a sort of surrender: “If one does not want to miss Hegel with one’s very first words, one must confront, however inadequately, the claim his philosophy makes to truth, rather than merely discussing his philosophy from above, and thereby from below.”²⁸ And it is no accident that Adorno draws on the imagery of language here (“with the first word”), and therefore on a rhetoric of language on language. For in Adorno’s sense, coming to terms with the Hegelian heritage is not merely conceptual labor but also always a radically linguistic work, which means that Hegel’s inheritance can be responsibly approached only when it is also constantly thought in and as language. Hegel’s inheritance appears questionable and worthy of question (frag-würdig)—in other words, as a linguistic phenomenon. This way of thinking inheritance adheres to one of Adorno’s observations from his Philosophical Terminology: “Essential to philosophy is its language, philosophical problems are largely problems of its language, and the disengagement of language from concerns that one finds in the so-called sciences, is not valid in the same way for philosophy.”²⁹

What is particular to Adorno’s way of linguistically and conceptually inheriting Hegel’s thinking is, as we will see in the following, the notion that the first question to be considered on the scene of inheriting is that of the manifold factors involved in determining the relation to an object. For only in clarifying a relation to things and concepts—the primary preoccupation of the uncoercive gaze itself—is it possible to determine more closely the relation that a subsequent instance of thinking is at all in the position to assume toward one that came before it.³⁰ This question does not revolve around the models of “influence” that so often appear foregrounded in procedures of philosophical, literary, and art-historical derivation. Rather, it turns upon the possibility of an unsaturated, hitherto undetermined, and perpetually displaced relational nexus. One possible name for this reflection upon the relation to an object (and that of objects to one another) is the constellation, which Adorno was partially spurred to adopt, as is well-known, by Benjamin’s book on the Origin of the German Mourning Play.³¹ On the one hand, the concept of the constellation is to be thought fundamentally as a spatial category, arising as it does with the study of astronomical phenomenology, which aims to track the positioning of heavenly bodies relative to one another and the corresponding system of relations on the part of the observer. On the other hand, it is nevertheless at the same time to be thought as standing in time; the constellation designates a spatial phenomenon that cannot be conceived apart from its temporality. The particular German concept of “space-time” (Zeitraum) gives testimony to this entanglement. Inheritance, for its part, can similarly be grasped as a thoroughly temporal phenomenon, even if it cannot be limited to thinking in terms of sheer seriality or succession—whereby Adorno’s model of the constellation decisively contributes to the elucidation of this concept.³²

If the constellation describes the possibilities and the interpretive reading of a space-time and if it is therefore, at the same time, spatially and temporally determined, it renders precisely the thought-figure that Adorno wishes to place in the service of a radical inheritance of Hegel, one that strategically reads Hegel “against the grain.”³³ The constellation presents, after all, both movement and standstill, a resistant conjunction, which is in the position to set the inheritance of Hegelian texts into a particular dimension of self-reflection. “To make an anachronistic comparison,” Adorno remarks, “Hegel’s publications are more like films of thought than texts. The untutored eye can never capture the details of a film in the way it can those of a still image, and so it is with Hegel’s writings.”³⁴ It is therefore incumbent upon the reading heir of Hegel to receive this film both in its full length and developmental dynamics and, at the same time, to interrupt it, to cut in when it comes to a certain word or image, and, by means of the constellation, to inscribe it into what Benjamin would call a dialectic at a standstill. The constellation—which at the same time proceeds and interrupts, stands within time and pauses in its temporality—designates for Adorno the most commensurate form for circumspectly approaching an inheritance in general as well as the particular inheritance of Hegel, via the categories of the ever-displaced referential relations among its singular elements.

In this sense, Negative Dialectics brings the thinking of the nonidentical and the form of the constellation into close conjunction. Admittedly, no philosophical thinking, not even the one practiced by Adorno, can presume to be in a position to absolve itself from the conceptual. For precisely the insight that Hegel formulated in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit—“true thoughts and scholarly insights” are “only to be won in the labor of the concept”³⁵—binds as much as ever the forms of self-conscious reason to the universality of a thinking that labors away at the concept. In order to set his understanding of the conceptual dialectic apart from that of Hegel, however, Adorno explains in Negative Dialectics, which was written shortly after the Three Studies of Hegel:

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 over-arching concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specificity of the object, the aspect that is indifferent or burdensome to a classifying procedure. The model for this is the way language relates. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it enters the scene essentially as a language, where it becomes presentation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it places the concepts, centered about a concern. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means. Constellations alone represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept wants so much to be as it cannot be. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior and reach, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.³⁶

Like Hegel, in looking to what is to be thought and rendered experience-able—and in looking precisely to the problem of double negation—Adorno is convinced of the need to labor on and in the concept.³⁷ However, inheriting the Hegelian model would, for him, have to take shape in such a way that the concepts relate differently to themselves and to the concerns they are mobilized to address. Whereas in his labor on the concept, Hegel steps out through it in order to step it up to a new, higher or more universal conceptual level (and thus to let the singular concepts ultimately vanish as purely preliminary stages—that is, to sublate [aufheben] them in the manifold sense of “lifting up” and “canceling out”), Adorno’s efforts do not revolve around aiming to sublate concepts in a way that would leave them behind and delegate them to the status of mere predecessors or preliminary stages. Instead, they orbit around the relation of concepts to the concept of the conceptual itself and translate it into newly thinkable forms. Only through the experimental clustering of singular concepts in relation to one another and to the object is the particularity of the object respected as such, rather than serving merely as indifferent material to be consumed along the way to another: to the next overarching concept, to knowledge per se, to absolute spirit itself. The conceptual fixed stars of the constellation enter into a sort of elective affinity with one another, an affinity that is in the position to illuminate the singular and irreducibly idiomatic aspects of the matter of concern and its related circumstances. The relation of concepts to one another as the well as their relation—both individually and as a constellation—to the object around which they cluster is thus to be conceived as a thoroughly open one that must always be thought through anew, and that is therefore principally inconclusive. The ever-shifting relations that make the constellation thinkable in the first place are inalienably bound up with a reading that is always about to begin anew, and thus with the demands and exactions of a permanently shifting interpretation whose adeptness has, at every point, to prove itself yet one more time, and thus to prove itself true.

Yet what the constellated, variable clusters of concepts surrounding a concern cannot circumvent is the mediated conjunction of language and object that first establishes meaning. At this point, the false impression could arise that Adorno’s uncoercive gaze means to develop a conceptual model that, on the one hand, refuses the hermeneutically oriented negation of negation—from which Hegel derives the positive positing of a further, sense-laden set of circumstances—but that he nonetheless wishes to introduce through the back door a similarly disposed thought-figure, in that he suppresses the irreducible difference among sign, signifier, and signified as they are charted in, for example, Saussure’s foundational studies on the structure of language. But the opposite is the case. In Adorno’s model of the constellation, language is always also the name for that precarious realm where, besides the meaning that is supposedly imparted within a commonly shared system of signs, the acute danger remains to be considered at the same time that meaning may dissolve and what was intended may disintegrate utterly. Already in the early “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” Adorno therefore writes: “Objects, however, are not at all adequately given through language, but rather adhere to language and stand in historical unity with it.”³⁸ Language stands in “historical” unity with objects because a thinking mode of speaking that is not itself dependent on the conditioned character and unreliability of language is an illusion. Thinking (and therefore, too, the thinking of inheritance) thus never comports itself neutrally with respect to its linguistic composition. Here, the moment of the nonidentical, upon which so much pivots, especially for the late Adorno, finds its authentic deposition in language. Language here is not to be thought as an expression of the identity between signs and things, but rather as the engagement with the ever nonidentical, incommensurate, treacherous character of irreducibly linguistic structures per se. Differing from the position represented by Hegel that the identical and the nonidentical are ultimately inscribed in the identical, the identical and the nonidentical remain, in Adorno, nonidentical.³⁹

If Adorno’s thought revolves around the thinking of constellations—a concept that he often and with good reason evokes in the plural—in order to raise to consciousness what refuses the concept (or “what the concept has cut away within”), then this thinking of an excess, of a “more” through which the concept wants to come to what it cannot be itself, embodies an ongoing commentary on what thinking as such cuts off as incommensurate with itself, on what thinking “excises,” as Adorno affirms in a consciously drastic vocabulary. Using a different formulation, one could say that the discourse of constellations in Adorno allows the element that resists the concept from within the concept to come into its own right, in that the constellation makes it possible to think language as a relation of language to itself and to consider concepts as a clustering relation to an object.

Consequently, the constellation would also have to be understood as a sort of labor on what lacks concept within the concept, and thus as Adorno’s proper labor on the heritage of idealism. In his circumspect essay on Adorno’s understanding of conceptual lack, Mirko Wischke rightly reminds us of this conceptual-theoretical heritage: “Proceeding from the assumption that every cognition is a ‘cognition through concepts,’ Kant, as is well known, made the experience that concepts never refer immediately to an object; no ‘images’ of objects lay the foundation for concepts; thinking is nothing other than cognition through concepts: the pure concepts of understanding deliver ‘no cognition of things.’ ” He continues:

Hegel agrees with Kant not only in thinking that concepts constitute their own reality; in the Phenomenology of Spirit he radicalizes this insight with the assumption that immediate being cannot be brought to linguistic expression. On the basis of this irreducible limit of language, it is ultimately “impossible ever to say a sensual being that we mean,” since the concept exists in something other than sensual reality.⁴⁰

In short, he holds that “Kant’s view that concepts, in ordering different views into a universal representation, are knowledge of things through universal representations, shapes the theoretical foundation for Hegel’s testimony that what we say of sensual being is different from sensual reality.”⁴¹ And this differentiation, as we can now affirm, was made experienceable for Adorno in the thought-figure of the constellation. There, it is to be brought to consciousness, which was always already determined by this very differentiation in a more or less unspoken, even spectral way. If, when it comes to the differentiation of concept, language, and object, Adorno feels himself to be the heir, too, of Hegel’s reading of Kant, he also extends this heritage decisively when he inserts it into a constellation relating the questions of conceptuality and the possibility of linguistic presentation to their concrete objects.

By employing the figure of the constellation in order to engage himself with inheriting Hegel inheriting Kant, Adorno at the same time implicitly relates his thinking to Nietzsche’s critique of concepts. At the center of Nietzsche’s critique stands the instance of violence that is inscribed in every conceptual operation. In the early theoretical text on language, “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,” he writes:

Let us think in particular of the formation of concepts. Every word becomes a concept as soon as it is supposed to serve not merely as a reminder of the unique, absolutely individualized original experience, to which it owes its origin, but at the same time to fit countless, more or less similar cases, which, strictly speaking, are never identical, and hence absolutely dissimilar. Every concept originates by the equation of the dissimilar. Just as no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other, certainly the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily dropping those individual differences, by forgetting the distinguishing factors, and this gives rise to the idea that besides leaves there is in nature such a thing as the “leaf,” i.e. an original form according to which all leaves are supposedly woven, sketched, circled off, colored, curled, painted, but by awkward hands, so that not a single specimen turns out correctly and reliably as a true copy of the original form . . . . Overlooking the individual and the real gives us the concept, just as it also gives us the form, whereas nature knows no forms and concepts, hence also no species, but only an x that is inaccessible and indefinable for us. For even our distinction between individual and species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things although we also do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it. For that would be a dogmatic assertion, and as such as just as unprovable as its opposite.⁴²

There is no concept without the equation of what is, in itself, dissimilar and unequal, no concept that does not, on the way to the next, more general overarching concept, threaten to veil or even to extinguish the singularity and dignity of what it subsumes. To be sure, it is one of the classical tasks of philosophical thinking to seek the more encompassing generality of the conceptual order behind or above the manifestations of the particular and concrete. But in so doing, it pays a high price: insight into the individual, and thus the real. The concept therefore works in both an illusory and a dis-illusioning way, betraying a costly trade-off—it brings to light the universal aspect of the particular, contingent, and accidental, and it proves insight into the sheer illusory nature or immediacy of the particular, but it also falls short of its proper claim to knowledge on the basis of its self-delusion, which traces back to the way that the concept fails to relate to the differentiality of what it is brought to bear upon and grasp. The thinking of the constellation that Adorno promotes, however, sets out to account for the particular and unprovable aspects of the individual in such a way that does not occlude the conceptual completely (for otherwise it would not be accessible to philosophical or theoretical thinking at all), but that, at the same time, sets the particular object of thought in a position to gather about itself, in clustering formations, those possible concepts that are drawn to grasp it. These concepts, in turn, are determined by neither dogmatic principles nor arbitrary will, but are shaped by the primacy of openness and inconclusiveness. They thereby thematize ever and again the relation into which they enter with one another and with the particular object. In this way, concepts enter into a potentially “free” relation to their objects and to the task of thinking itself. And in the domain of free relations—for which the constellation has stepped in as an advocate and as the condition of its possibility—the objects have, for their part, begun their arrangements to extricate themselves from the patronizing hold of the concept that structurally equalizes the dissimilar, and to wrest themselves from the iron grip that would subordinate the particular to a superior order.

Which foundational questions does the inheriting reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit—in many respects Hegel’s most consequential text, which, for its part, inherits German Idealism in order, at the same time, to end it—have to pose? Adorno is well aware that the Phenomenology is dedicated to the presentation of the appearance of knowing, as it sets itself apart from the critical idealism of Kant, the subjective idealism of Fichte, and the objective idealism of Schelling, in order to develop the notion of an absolute idealism. The slowly progressing self-transformation of spirit into absolute spirit is the theme of Hegel’s movement of thought, which pursues the question of how spirit becomes what it is. The subject, in its proper, irreducible temporality, forms itself through experience and action by opening in a dialectically mediated way to the other, and so through the transactions of mutual recognition processes, it becomes what it is itself: a form of historically conditioned self-positing spirit.⁴³ Of primary interest is the experience of consciousness as self-consciousness, an experience that consciousness is in the position to make from its spiritual formation and to account for in speculative discourse. This account issues onto the absolute concept of itself. In the determinate negation—that is, in the negation which strategically enters into the particular aspects of what it negates, and through the negation of negation formulates the movement of the dialectic itself—spirit becomes conscious of itself through its progressive motion, and thereby comes to itself.⁴⁴ This cleaving apart of the concept and its experience becomes, in turn, itself a theme for spirit and advances to become the central problem of philosophical thinking per se.⁴⁵

Through this cleaving of concept and experience, Hegel also introduces an alternative notion of philosophical doubt, which demarcates itself from the doubting-thinking cogito of Cartesianism. The concept of knowing that is at stake for Hegel “can therefore be viewed as the way of doubt,” as the Phenomenology avers, “or more properly as the way of despair; for what takes place along the way, is not what tends to be understood as doubt, namely a shaking of this or that supposed truth,” but rather “the conscious insight into the untruth of what appears to be knowing, where what seems to be most real is, in truth, the unrealized concept.”⁴⁶ The truth-content of any concept of knowing, which can always manifest itself as doubt and despair in the experience of a thinking, developing consciousness, is only to be had in such a way that the concept takes up an unobvious interpretation of the phenomenon as its yet outstanding conceptual consolidation. For the concrete realization of the concept still stands to be carried out; it remains to be achieved through the labor of thinking and experience.

The attempt to inherit Hegel’s texts therefore has to orient itself toward a perspective that both recognizes what is thought in them as truth-content solidified in historical form, and that thematizes their contemporary legacies with each subsequent reading. “Even ideas that were at one time firmly established,” as Adorno argues, “have a history of their truth and not a mere afterlife; they do not remain inherently indifferent to what befalls them. At the present time Hegelian philosophy, and all dialectical thought, is subject to the paradox that it has been rendered outdated by science and scholarship while being at the same time more timely than ever in its opposition to them.”⁴⁷ For, Adorno remarks further, “if one wishes to avoid halfheartedly preserving . . . while at the same time watering down his [Hegel’s] philosophy, then one has no choice but to set the very moments in him that cause consternation into relation to the experiences his philosophy incorporates, even if those experiences are encoded within it and their truth is concealed.”⁴⁸ It is no accident that Adorno employs the expression “set into relation” here. For the legacy of Hegelian philosophy, understood dialectically, relates to the commentary of any given present that would inherit it in a way that is at the same time outdated and most timely, and thus enters into a constellative relation, showing itself as an element of the very constellation that construes it. Hegel’s heritage first posits itself in the process of inheriting.

This Hegelian self-positing of the constellative cannot, however, prescribe the orientation of each respective constellation or presuppose it as though it were simply a given. The warning therefore needs to be taken into account that a constellation and the mode of thinking from which it stems refuse to be recognized and evaluated from a point of view shaped by personal convictions. For this reason, Adorno emphasizes:

According to Hegel’s distinction between abstract and real possibility, only something that has become real is actually possible. This kind of philosophy sides with the big guns. It adopts the judgment of a reality that always destroys what could be different. Even here, however, one should not judge Hegel solely on the basis of one’s convictions. Persistent involvement with Hegel teaches one—and this is probably true of every great philosophy—that one cannot select what suits oneself from his philosophy and reject what one finds consternating. It is this somber necessity and not an ideal of completeness that engenders the seriousness and substantiality of Hegel’s systematic claims. The truth of those claims lies in the skandalon, not in its plausibility. Hence rescuing Hegel—and only rescue, not renewal, is appropriate for him—means placing oneself before his philosophy where it is most painful and wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvious.⁴⁹

The that and not the what would therefore stand first of all in the center of the Hegelian heritage. The fact that thinking presents itself in this way is already in itself the provocation, the truth to be rescued. To rescue Hegel by inheriting him—and thus to rescue Hegel’s legacy—does not demand that we explain away what seems questionable but that we confirm the interruption, the caesura with which we must engage before all pretensions to understanding any of its content.

Insofar as Adorno approaches the Hegelian inheritance by way of the constellation, he is no doubt aware of a major difficulty within the Phenomenology, namely, that many of its individual parts do not seem connected in a compulsory-logical way, while its architectonics does not always follow the systematic construction principles that the concept developed in the text of a compulsorily developing system seems outright to demand. In the scholarship on Hegel, this problematic of a textual structure that cannot be wholly reconstructed is often pointed out—a problem that cannot be explained away by pointing to the haste with which the last part of the Phenomenology was written or by regarding the text as a work of youth.⁵⁰ However, Adorno’s work toward a constellative interpretation of the structure of the Phenomenology could be taken up as a particular form of rescue (“and only rescue . . . is appropriate for him”). For the figure of the constellation allows the implicit structures of relation among the individual textual elements to be brought to light in the belatedness of an interpreting inheritance without proceeding arbitrarily or brushing over the real breaches and vertiginous caesurae in Hegel’s text.

But to what extent, we may now ask, does Hegel’s thinking, both as it unfolds in the Phenomenology and in the texts that follow it, demand a particular hermeneutic commitment when it comes to the inheritance of this thinking and its postulates? This question poses itself all the more urgently if what scholars so often maintain is true, as when Robert B. Pippin writes, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a book that had no predecessors and that, with the possible exception of works such as Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Lukács’s History and Class-Consciousness or Pound’s Cantos (and perhaps Wittgenstein’s Investigations), no true successors.”⁵¹ Adorno presents the difficulty of an interpreting mode of inheriting by showing how the Hegelian system of thought relates to its possible interpretation and thereby enters into a relation with this interpreting approach:

Like other closed systems of thought, Hegel’s philosophy avails itself of the dubious advantage of not having to allow any criticism whatsoever. All criticism of the details, according to Hegel, remains partial and misses the whole, which in any case takes this criticism into account. Conversely, criticizing the whole as a whole is abstract, “unmediated,” and ignores the fundamental motif of Hegelian philosophy: that it cannot be distilled into any “maxim” or general principle and proves its worth only as a totality, in the concrete interconnections of all its moments. Accordingly, the only way to honor Hegel is to refuse to allow oneself to be intimidated by the virtually mythological complexity of his critical method, which makes criticism seem false no matter what, and instead of graciously or ungraciously listing or denying his merits, got after the whole, which is what Hegel himself was after.⁵²

The thinking that a productive inheritance of Hegel would have to enter into, even if it were oriented toward its critique or toward placing it in question, cannot limit itself to an act of censorship that praises certain elements of Hegelian thought while criticizing others. Inheriting Hegel means neither speaking for its putative indisputability, which would permit only an immanent self-comparison among the contents of Hegel’s texts, nor does it mean performing an instrumental division of the useful from the useless. Any procedure oriented according to such maxims would give the “honors” neither to Hegel nor to his inheriting commentator. This is the case not only because, in Hegelian philosophy “[e]ven the marks of its miscarriage were struck by truth itself”⁵³—which means that, in the dialectical sense, its failings can also always be read as a success, as a successfully carried-off failure—but also because Hegel’s entire movement of thought demands a commensurate form of inheriting, which Adorno would see to anchoring primarily in constellative thinking.

The more an inheriting reading is committed to the logic of the constellation and enters into the foundational question of its interpretation and engagement with the linguistically mediated concept, the less it can limit itself to the interpretation of individual moments, even if it must, at the same time, forgo “the lecherous urge for the ‘grand total’ (Benjamin).”⁵⁴ Thus, Adorno emphasizes that his inheriting mode of reading “does not claim to accomplish of itself the illumination of Hegel’s main works, something that is long-outstanding. It merely formulates considerations of principle bearing on this task; at best it hazards guesses about how one would arrive at an understanding, without dispensing anyone from the efforts involved in concretizing those considerations with regard to the texts.”⁵⁵ After and according to Adorno, reading to inherit Hegel means to enter into fundamental reflections on the scene of inheritance, where something wishes to be given over and understood, and therefore provides covert hints as to how it might be read—thus inventing its ideal reader—while placing in question the conditions of possibility for a correct interpretation of those hints. “The issue is not to make the reading of Hegel easier,” Adorno thus confirms, “but to prevent the extraordinary exertions that Hegel requires, now as then, from being wasted.”⁵⁶

The productive movement of constellative thinking in Adorno’s reading of Hegel therefore often owes itself to the unsettled meaning of the text to be inherited. For this reason, in the third part of Three Studies on Hegel, “Skoteinos, or, How to Read”—which refers not only to the reading of Hegel but also, at the same time, to Adorno’s reading and to the inheriting reading of difficult texts per se—Adorno remarks: “In the realm of great philosophy Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively decide what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a decision is even possible.”⁵⁷ The condition of possibility for a responsible inheritance cannot be found in the supposedly stable meaning of a text—as if what remained to be understood were already understood and appropriated—but is indebted to a certain deferral of meaning. Reading does not relate to the Hegelian text as though an already existing meaning that happens to be misrepresented by external circumstances (such as its presentation) were to be recovered through corresponding efforts. Rather, the condition for a radically interpretive inheritance rests upon the irreducible possibility of its impossibility, upon an undecidability that does not persist because one does not know how to decide among already existing interpretive possibilities, but because the Hegelian text fundamentally places the notion of such a decision in question. What could otherwise appear as a sheer risk or lack is, in reality, the precondition for a concentrated interpretive inheriting, which must proceed all the more rigorously precisely because it can, at no point in time, be sure of its immediate possibility or even take itself for granted.

It is not the case that the individual moments of the constellation open themselves to interpretation while, for the interpreting heir, their constellated collective shape remains in the dark. To the contrary, only an engagement with the constellation as it escapes immediate hermeneutic grasp makes clear what was always already covertly the case with regard to its individual moments: namely, that they, too, are in motion and in no case yield themselves lightly to the prying of interpretive disclosure. For Adorno, this element of inheriting Hegel’s texts stands in an exemplary fashion for philosophical-speculative thinking as such. He therefore states:

The specificity of philosophy as a configuration of moments is qualitatively different from a lack of ambiguity in every particular moment, even within the configuration, because the configuration itself is more, and other, than the quintessence of its moments. Constellation is not system. Everything does not become resolved, everything does not come out even; rather, one moment sheds light on the other, and the figures that the individual moments form together are specific signs and a legible script. This is not yet articulated in Hegel, whose mode of presentation is characterized by a sovereignly indifferent attitude toward language: at any rate it has not penetrated into the chemism of his own linguistic form.⁵⁸

The linguistic appropriation of the inheritance left behind in his texts would therefore have to depart from a concept of the constellation in which the individual moments present themselves as already highly constellated in themselves. And it would have to open to a language, a script, and a presentational style in which the linguistic character of the constellative is thematized as (its) linguistic character per se. This critical gesture and point of departure would also mean, however, parting ways with the texts of Hegel in order to go over and beyond them, as their most radical insights light upon the situation of each proper attempt at inheriting and interpreting. To remain true to Hegel’s inheritance would likewise mean, however, to break with it strategically, to confront it with itself, in order to place thinking in the position to be thought with, against, and through itself. If the constellation is not and could never be a system—not even a Hegelian one—then it may also, in this truly treasonous self-thematization, allow a late revival of an Early Romantic gesture to shine through Adorno’s prose as well, one which Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum expresses: “It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and not have a system. One will simply have to decide to combine the two.”⁵⁹

Just as the singular conceptual elements of a constellation do not stand still once and for all, but are always disposed to reconsideration according to their varying preponderance, so too does the relation of the moments of thought in Hegel still remain hovering, “interpretable” solely “in light of knowledge of the general train of Hegel’s thought, and especially the conceptual structure” that properly belongs to every single Hegelian text.⁶⁰ Yet this very moment of hovering, which installs the concepts that in each passage emerge to enter into a constellation, calls for emphatic recognition in the act of an interpretive inheriting: “One cannot simply gloss over those passages in which it remains up in the air what is being dealt with; their structure must be inferred from the substance of Hegel’s philosophy. Its hovering character is in accordance with the doctrine that the truth cannot be grasped in any individual thesis or any delimited positive statement. Hegel’s form is commensurate with this intention.”⁶¹ One could say that Adorno relates the hovering character that forms Hegel’s writing and thinking syntactically to the truth-content of the constellative cluster, where likewise no single concept, no single grasp on the object, may be incorporated with an absolute claim to validity. Rather, the constellation names the site where the true—if the latter allows itself to be fleetingly glimpsed at all—comes to light as a nontotalizing conjunction of singularities, which in turn remain “up in the air,” and which, in this hovering condition, test each time their freedom relative to one another and to their object.

Adorno, with Hegel, sets himself apart from the geometrically and mathematically oriented ideal of clarity, which has determined the discourse of metaphysical thinking since Descartes and which proceeds without regard for the aporia that “the demand for clarity gets tangled up linguistically because language does not actually permit the words themselves clarity.”⁶² In so doing, he enters into a constellative concept of the speaking subject, which is never fully master of its language and which therefore cannot reduce language to the instrumental dimension of communication. For this reason, Adorno can appeal to a concept of the subject that departs from the notion “that the subject too is not static like a camera on a tripod; rather, the subject itself also moves, by virtue of its relationship to the object that is inherently in motion—one of the central tenets of Hegel’s Phenomenology.”⁶³ The camera image that Adorno’s rhetoric employs here is no accident. For if the subject is not static like a camera on a tripod, it also is no pure recording device for capturing an independently existing world of things that capitulates and subjects itself to its primacy on the basis of certain laws. Instead, the subject makes its entrance as a constellative element inscribed in the scene of recording, and itself adapts according to its proper presentational techniques and its objects, in that it constantly adopts a new standpoint. There is no inheriting and speaking subject without a constellation, and no constellation without an ongoing process of shifting, displacing, and reconfiguring. The subject that is at stake here cannot, therefore, “capture” in the photographic sense the inheritance that comes down to it; it can picture no image of the inheritance; it is not in the picture. It inherits rather, in that it removes itself and keeps its objects up in the air, without ever being able to depict them completely or to fasten them in the spell of an endlessly reproducible recording.

This elusive aspect of the constellation, which constantly installs itself anew, marks the process of the constellation as one which finds itself in the midst of becoming. In his “Remarks on Philosophical Thinking,” Adorno therefore notes, as we recall from our discussion at the beginning of this book: “Truth is a constellation in the midst of becoming, not something running continuously and automatically.”⁶⁴ If truth thus becomes constellation, however—and here the emphasis should be placed, throughout, on the progressively unfolding dimension of becoming—it now stands to reason that Hegel’s inheritance would likewise be an evolving constellation. “The fact that,” in Adorno’s sense, “no philosophical thinking of quality allows of concise summary, that it does not accept the usual scientific distinction between process and result—Hegel, as is known, conceived truth as process and result in one—renders this experience palpably clear.”⁶⁵ The palpable, which the inheriting consciousness grips in the concept’s concrete work of making something graspable, cannot therefore separate process and result in the figure of the constellation, because the constellation takes place in and as what cannot be held fast. From the lyrical perspective of Hegel’s school friend and lifelong conversation partner Hölderlin, to whom Adorno dedicates his important study of parataxis, one could say of the constellation: “yet it takes place, the true [Es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre].”⁶⁶ It takes place, in other words, in the self-reflexive, self-positing gestures of those shifting relations and relays that displace it.

The legacies Hegel leaves behind, for which Adorno feels himself responsible and for which he employs the constellation, are constantly to be encountered on at least two levels. They demand to be read and interpreted, for without reading and without interpretation, they could not be disclosed and worked through. At the same time, however, the very conceptual force and productive momentum that characterize these legacies as such remain inherent in the foundational experience of skoteinos— that is, in the darkness and obscurity that cannot be sublated or canceled by any dialectic. It is no coincidence that Adorno forms the question of how to read and inherit Hegel through the concept of skoteinos. For each inheriting turn towards Hegel’s legacy would have to take on anew the consternating constellation that opens between the necessity to read and to disclose what is left behind—a necessity that will not leave off—and the irreducible experiential content of skoteinos. In the abyssal opacity of skoteinos, inheriting, reading, and interpreting enter into a lucidly recalcitrant constellation in order to elicit a seminal version of the uncoercive gaze.