A Model Beyond Foundations: Adorno’s Theological Constellation
The question of Adorno’s appropriation of theology has moved toward the center of recent scholarship. Leading positions argue that Adorno is an ardent secular-ist, using theological language only rhetorically; that Adorno’s philosophy is an Inverse Theology; or that Adorno’s philosophy evinces a Negative Theology. What is it about Adorno’s philosophy that produces such divergent readings and which, if any, is correct? This article reviews these three influential positions, discusses key elements in Adorno’s philosophy that these readings hinge on, and argues that ultimately the logic of the constellation, Adorno’s premier model for his philosophy, undercuts these positions. What’s more, this article suggests the model of Adorno’s theological constellation offers an underappreciated nonfoundationalist framework that shows important promise for critical social theory today.
Adorno, constellation, Critical Theory, Post-Secular, negative dialectics
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One of the stranger things in Adorno’s writings is his use of theological language. Is it mere rhetorical flourish or does it have deeper bearing on his philosophy? Scholars have tended to either deem this language dismissible [End Page 438] Adornoian “baggage,” or consider its significance to be secondary to the theological ideas of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, and other luminaries in Adorno’s intellectual orbit.2 This is starting to change. Post-secularism3 moved religion and theology toward the center of recent work in critical theory, and currently, the question of Adorno’s “theology” is enjoying something of a moment. This has not brought clarity to the question. On the contrary, views are only multiplying. Adorno’s philosophy is now argued to be, among other things, a dialectic of secularization;4 a minimal theology, or theology in pianissimo;5 a negative theodicy;6 an inverse theology;7 a negative theology;8 a crypto-theology;9 a fundamentally irreligious, secular philosophy;10 and a philosophy whose “every word” is “penetrated” by theology.11
This raises several key questions: What aspects of Adorno’s philosophy give rise to such divergent interpretations, and which interpretation is most consistent with his thought? How might resolving this question reshape our understanding of broader and more extensively studied themes in his work? Finally, why—if at all—does this matter for the concerns of critical theory today?
This article seeks, first, to clarify what we mean by Adorno’s theological language and its significance, which I suggest we understand through two important features of his philosophy: the “non-identical,” and the “constellation.” I then examine three influential positions in current literature: Adorno the Secularist, Adorno the Inverse Theologian, and Adorno the Negative Theologian. I argue that Adorno’s model of constellation, which has implicit centrality in his philosophy and inflects his key concepts including the non-identical, undermines these three positions. Building on this, I argue that Adorno’s model of constellation, as it shapes his use of theological language, provides a compelling nonfoundational framework for critical theory today—one that not only exposes latent foundations but also reorients key debates on reason, pluralism, and post-secularity.
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Adorno is generally read as a secular historical materialist, yet he employs a myriad of theological language throughout his ramified philosophical oeuvre such as the transcendent, the absolute, the biblical “ban on images” (Bilderverbot), messianism, the sacred and the profane, and redemption. [End Page 439] Making sense of the tension between Adorno’s seemingly secular philosophy and his use of theological language is not simple. For context, we might examine the dialectic between faith or revelation and reason that runs through Kant, Hegel, and other German Idealists—a dialectic that Adorno and other Frankfurt school theorists also engage with. We could consider the direction of political theology and ask whether and how Adorno “secularizes” theological concepts, using them as critical tools for social, political, and cultural criticism. Additionally, we might look at the Marxist relationship with theology that underpins much of early Frankfurt school thought, the Weberian diagnosis of secularization and disenchantment that Adorno draws upon, Walter Benjamin’s influence on Adorno in this regard, or even to Gershom Scholem’s influence on Adorno, as some recent scholarship does.12
Here, I want to reverse the usual approach. Rather than asking what Adorno’s theological language reveals about his philosophy, I ask what the central categories of his philosophy require of our interpretation of his theological language. This has the benefit of granting Adorno’s own philosophy as the guide to answering the philosophical import of the question, and at the same time, allows us to consider whether Adorno’s philosophy offers a unique answer beyond well-rehearsed explorations rooted in external influences and competing agendas.
What immediately complicates this effort is that Adorno himself offered both a critical assessment of religion and theology,13 specifically in their positive forms, and at times seemingly approved of his philosophy’s likeness to a kind of theology.14 What’s clear is that Adorno neither fully explains nor explicitly justifies his reliance on theological concepts and alludes to their significance only in passing. Adorno’s esoteric remarks about his theological language—indeed even the very structure of Adorno’s thought—suggests that any serious account of the place and significance of theology in his philosophy requires a thoroughgoing, reconstructive approach.
Toward this end, I suggest that Adorno’s theological usages can be reliably discerned along two tracks. First, Adorno uses a range of explicit theological language, and second, this language evinces an implicit connection to core concepts in his philosophy. But fist, what merits calling his theological language theological?
What is most striking is that Adorno consistently employs terms that are conventionally associated with theology throughout his major works. [End Page 440] I begin with the simple but crucial observation that Adorno’s texts are replete with language that has its heritage in the religious and theological traditions of the West. This signals the “first track,” his explicit use of conventionally understood theological language.
Yet, while the historical and philological origins of this language may be relevant, I do not believe the apparent origins of these terms should be taken as determinative of their function in his thought. These terms can be recognized as theological in a conventional sense, while also interpreted philosophically—through the guiding concerns and internal logic of Adorno’s own philosophy. Thus, my aim is not to trace specific theological motifs in Adorno’s work back to their historical sources, nor to identify them merely as remnants of external influences. This is because, by Adorno’s own terms, we cannot isolate this language from his broader philosophical project or dismiss it as mere rhetoric. Rather Adorno demonstrates an integrated view of linguistic “form” and “content” that undermines a merely incidental or rhetorical understanding of his theological language.
As he explains this, in his philosophy, “the rhetorical element”—what we might mistake for the mere form or external presentation of linguistic content—is instead itself “on the side of content [Inhalt].”15 Form, then, is not an ornamental layer but an integral aspect of meaning.16 Just as the sound of music is inseparable from the instrument producing it, shaping the very “content” of the musical outcome, so too is Adorno’s linguistic form inseparable from what he seeks to convey. Thus, his theological language must be considered within the contours of his broader “linguistic effort,” interpreted in relation to his central philosophical concerns.
This approach reverses the typical line of inquiry. Instead of asking what Adorno’s theological language reveals about his philosophy, I ask what his philosophy demands of our interpretation of his theological language. This aligns with Adorno’s broader critique of identity thinking—resisting the tendency to collapse a concept’s meaning into its historical origins. A totalizing or mere genealogical approach that treats theological concepts as overdetermined by their history would fail to account for their shifting nature. As I’ll soon explore, Adorno seeks to disclose the non-identity between concepts and objects, as well as the internal contradictions within them, resisting any fixed determination by historical precedent or singular frameworks. To deny this would be to perpetuate the myth of an unchanging [End Page 441] identity, whether of concepts, objects, or their relations. Rather than seeking a fixed meaning, then, what do core features of Adorno’s philosophy demand of our interpretation of his theological language?
This leads to the “second track.” Adorno shows that his use of theological language is implicitly connected to core themes in his philosophy. He argues that metaphysics and theology are crucially linked, as both are a haven for truth beyond immediate facts. Metaphysics, he writes, “preserves theology in its critique”17 by not absolutizing immanence, and so is akin even “to the very possibility of freedom.”18 Central to his intentions, Adorno tells us, is the “salvation of metaphysics . . . I might have almost have said, theology.”19 He further claims that “nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the realm of the secular, the profane.”20 Adorno links the importance of migrating theological content to the need of forming “perspectives” that would show current reality as it would appear fully redeemed, as he claims in one of his best-known passages:
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.21
True to his reputation as the philosopher of the negative par excellence, Adorno engages theological language and themes negatively, as we can see from these passages. He contrasts current conditions to an ultimate theological idea—here, messianic redemption—that would make current reality appear not relatively but ultimately damaged. “Messianic redemption” seeks to negatively illuminate current conditions by a radical standard that eludes anything in current conditions that would positively fulfill this concept.
As these well-cited passages demonstrate, we can see the two tracks at work: Adorno’s use of explicit, negative theological language, and an implied, thematic connection between this language and his expressed philosophical goals, namely freedom and redemption. But it is primarily his concept of non-identity, what Adorno calls the very “hinge”22 of negative dialectics, that readers typically hone to gauge a theological pulse in his [End Page 442] philosophy.23 To this end, what does Adorno mean by non-identity and what is its purported theological resonance in his philosophy?
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Adorno tells us that non-identity is the central negative feature of a “negative” dialectics that ensues between concepts and objects, and even, between reason and nature. By this Adorno seeks to rework both Hegelian dialectical logic and the Kantian categories. Negative dialectics means to resist a Hegelian positive reconciliation into identity between concept and object, and the historical teleology and agency therein. Negative dialectics also seeks to transform Kant’s transcendental logic, in which pure categories constitute the conditions for the possibility of our experience of objects. Adorno calls the negativity that eludes the identity principle not the Kantian “thing in itself,” but rather the “non-identical” (das Nichtidentische).
By this elusive concept Adorno seeks to disclose a non-teleological, historical mediation between concepts and objects, and, by immanent determinate negation, an actual and contingent non-identity between them. In so doing he prioritizes the object within subject-object relations, rather than prioritizing what he sees as the myth of purely subjective, transcendental, and ahistorical conditions that constitute our experience of objects. With negative dialectics Adorno seeks, in a famous phrase, to use the “power of subjectivity to break through the fallacy [Trug] of constitutive subjectivity.”24 As Adorno and Horkheimer argue in Dialectic of Enlightenment, constitutive subjectivity is part and parcel of reason’s reversal into myth, the myth of a wholly constituting, unified subject that dominates and controls its world, the workings of a devastatingly destructive, instrumentalized reason.
In addition to the non-identical, the “constellation” defines Adorno’s philosophy in a way particularly relevant for understanding his theological usages as it inflects his key concepts, including the non-identical. Adorno claims negative dialectics cannot be understood as traditional dialectics at all but rather as “an ensemble of analyses of models,” or constellations.25 By the constellation—an idea Adorno modifies drastically from Benjamin’s “dialectical image”26—Adorno means that both concepts and objects are groupings [End Page 443] of relations. A constellation is a model that uniquely groups multiple points without subsuming those points into a conceptual hierarchy or into an overarching teleology or system.27 Put differently, Adorno rethinks Hegelian subject-object relations and the Kantian categories according to a constellational paradigm. Subject-object relations are thought of as “combinations,” multifaced connections, that have an historical and objective primacy, which can never be fully determined or captured by instrumental reason.
Importantly, in the constellational model, identity between subject and object, or concept and thing, is not posited beforehand or necessitated as a result of the constellation, and neither is non-identity. Working from a constellational paradigm is to operate without a guiding principle of identity that drives the logic of identity thinking, though it is to recognize that this is the impulse or drive of instrumental reason, and that this drive has real effects, both now and historically. Because this is the drive of instrumental reason, Adorno believes we cannot just shake it off. Rather, we must operate within its terms, showing falseness in what appears to be true by its terms, in order to get beyond the mythos of instrumental reason. Adorno’s negative dialectic operates from within the structure of traditional identity-driven dialectics to get beyond it—or at least to clear the way enough to get a vantage point on the pathic structure itself.
Adorno’s philosophy then shows two senses of non-identity, both at work in negative dialectics. The first sense of non-identity refers to concrete instances of non-identity between particular subjects and objects, concepts and things. For example, when we identify a table as a table, a particular table is determined by this general or “universal” concept, yet the specific table, as a material, individual, particular thing, is actually not identical to any concept of it. Moreover, my concept of the table is dependent on the actual concrete materiality of the specific table, not the other way around. Materiality precedes conceptuality yet in our experience is always already mediated by it. In this way Adorno claims that as soon as we apply concepts empirically, they “lag behind themselves.”28 While the table and its concept mediate each other, and share an historical and social index, for Adorno the material object has priority in this relationship. The table, as material thing, can never be wholly determined by or identical to its concept—at least, perhaps, short of an “axial turn” out of instrumental reason, beyond both traditional and negative dialectics.29
What’s more, the changing points of non-identity between a material thing and its concept bears a social history that changes over time. This [End Page 444] change is stored in both the concept and in the object and indicates a second sense of non-identity, what we might call radical non-identity. Adorno invokes a sense of radical non-identity like an ultimate negativity that traces both our ineradicable dependency on objectivity and the changing, historical limits of conceptual identification. This second sense of non-identity resembles a “qualified limit-concept,” as Adorno himself claims,30 as it seems to signal an ultimate, negative limit. But whereas the Kantian limit-concept of the “thing-in-itself,” demarcating the unknowable noumenon from the knowable phenomenon, purportedly oversteps its own boundary, Adorno’s philosophical constellation seeks to avoid this metaphysical trap.31
Conceptually, the constellation groups and re-groups concepts to illustrate historical truth, disclosed as the non-identity between concepts and the objects they seek to determine. Likewise, the objects of concepts, their materiality, can also be understood as a grouping and regrouping of historical determinations. Radical non-identity as a limit-concept is thus also constellational; it is not a transcendental or metaphysical concept that determines or grounds the parts of a system—it is not a “thing,” nor does it rest on ontological or metaphysical assumptions. This moves Adorno away from a metaphysical or ontological system that absolutizes non-identity or construes it as a regulative or transcendental limit-concept.
As an illustration, consider the family as a constellation. The individuals within a family are shaped by shifting patterns of relation—binding and unbinding in ways that do not follow a fixed teleology yet form meaningful, historically embedded configurations. The concept of “family” and its objects—the actual families it designates—are not identical; a non-identity persists between them. This non-identity itself evolves over time as understandings of family shift, altering what is recognized as a family. This is a constellational view because the individuals constituting a family form the whole, but the constellation itself is not grounded in any metaphysical or ontological foundation. Even when historically a foundational ideal, such as theological concepts like monarchy or, in some cases, patriarchy or matriarchy, has been used to “ground” or regulate the family system, we observe over time the transmutation of these concepts, revealing their constellational nature.
This is not to suggest that the concept of “family” or actual families lack existence or significance due to these shifts. Adorno’s philosophy emphasizes the primacy of the object. What it reveals is that the family—both as a concept and as an object—can be understood in constellational terms: as [End Page 445] a nonfoundational, evolving grouping of parts, mediated by sociohistorical forces. It also shows that non-identity is not a static or substantial “thing” between shifting concepts and objects; rather, both in concrete instances and as a more radical claim of epistemological humility, non-identity is a changing, historical trace of dissonance between them.
For sure, much is unclear about Adorno’s model of the constellation. Adorno suggested “key categories” to “read” constellations.32 But who chooses the keys, and how is truth qualified?33 These are important concerns, and I’ll expand on them shortly. Here, I want to emphasize not whether the constellation is fully defensible or wholly rigorous, but that Adorno offers the constellation as a philosophical model as an alternative to first principles, working from a foundational or regulative concept, or philosophical “system-building.” Whereas the Kantian thing-in-itself rests within a metaphysical package, so to speak, Adorno’s concept of the non- identical is not a metaphysical claim, nor does it make metaphysical or ontological presuppositions. It rests in the framework of the constellation that sees traditional dialectics, and even metaphysics, as an outcome of an inherent negativity in subject-object relations that are historical.
The second sense of the non-identical as detailed above, while perhaps appearing as a limit-concept in the Kantian sense, is instead an active constituent and determinant in historical subject-object relations, a negative fissure within those relations, but it is not part of a metaphysics or ontology, nor does it demarcate a metaphysical or transcendental otherness or alterity to being or thought. Non-identity as a limit-concept in this sense is outside of a system-building or foundationalist philosophy.
The non-identical is tethered to Adorno’s understanding of social conditions that are diffuse and multi-perspectival, beyond identity thinking that posits a “happy match” between concepts and objects.34 Negative dialectics seeks to critique “wrong life,” and suggests that “wrong conditions” are not necessary or fated but contingent and open to change. This point extends to Adorno’s model of the constellation and includes the components of philosophical constellations—it even extends to the concept of the non-identical and to negative dialectics itself. Adorno himself cautions against positing dialectics, whether by a principle of identity or non-identity, as in negative dialectics, as a prima philosophia, a sort of “prima dialectica.”35 Dialectics “is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context,” whereas the goal of negative dialectics is “to break out of the context from within.”36 [End Page 446]
With this understanding of Adorno’s negative dialectics as a philosophy of constellation—one that shapes his key concepts, such as the non-identical, and even his theological language—I will now examine what I see as several shortcomings in leading interpretations of his use of theological language.
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4.1—Adorno the Secularist
The secularist reading, what we might even call the default reading, takes two routes. It either holds that Adorno’s theological language is dispensable, or that it is “mere” rhetoric.37 The problem with the first route is that it lacks rigor and, like the second, it neglects Adorno’s own explicit commitments about philosophical language. As I’ve argued, Adorno’s “linguistic effort”—which includes theological language—is integral to his core philosophical approach. As such it can’t be neatly separated out from his philosophy, nor should we downgrade its role in his philosophy compared to other apparently “secular” themes.
James Gordon Finlayson, offering a nuanced position within the second route, claims Adorno’s appeal to theology is feigned, an “as-if” theology—a phrase Adorno himself applies to Kafka—that is used as a means to another end, namely, to disclose “this world as abject and in need of redemption.”38 Finlayson backs this argument with Adorno’s explicit remarks about contradiction, exaggeration, and style. However, it is problematic to say Adorno’s theological language, or a position it suggests, is feigned, or just a means to another end. Adorno himself admonished using religion and theology in this way:
One cannot pronounce something like a religious ideal for the sake of the effect it has. There is only one legitimation for pronouncing an ideal, and that is its own truth . . . religion should not be used in any sense as a means to an end, neither on account of religion nor on account of the cause for which it is used.39
Elsewhere Adorno writes, “If religion is accepted for the sake of something other than its own truth content, then it undermines itself.”40 These points, alongside my reconstructive approach in the previous section, complicate [End Page 447] the reading that Adorno’s theological usages are dispensable or “merely” rhetorical, or even a means serving other ends. More than this, the secular-ist reading fails to account for the fact that Adorno resists neatly separating concepts between religious and secular frameworks or otherwise assumes that his philosophy somehow accomplishes this separation.
4.2—Adorno the Inverse Theologian
In current literature, Adorno’s “inverse theology” is meant to describe Adorno’s “secular” theology, however paradoxical. This interpretation, which builds on Adorno’s own “inverse theological” reading of Kafka and his comparison of this approach to his own philosophy,41 argues that Adorno, like Marx,42 used determinate negation to disclose the untruth of “inverted,” or untrue, social conditions, thereby affirming the possibility of the improvement of those conditions by our own means. This places hope in our hands, rather than in another world, like heaven or the world-to-come, or in a transcendent power, like God. On this reading, Adorno offers hope by inverting our inverted world, by disclosing truth by the determinate negation of untruth. Glimpses of redemption come from moments of truth-showing from within damaged life.
Deborah Cook argues that Adorno’s inverse theology provides redemption like a transcendent concept, preventing us from becoming totally severed from the concept of “redemption in existence.”43 Similarly, Peter Gordon explores Adorno’s inverse theology as a counterfactual appeal, like a regulative function, providing a “materialist inversion” of traditional religious transcendence through “the resolute presentation of unhappiness.”44 On this reading, redemption is understood as a this-worldly redemption by human action alone that we posit in advance, to guide us out of social wrongs and “damaged life.” Redemption, even if this-worldly, appears as the immutable, orienting factor that gives meaning to the essentially damaged historical present and acts as the orienting guide for social criticism.
However, reading Adorno in this way inches close to Benjamin’s cautionary tale of the “mechanical Turk” in “On the Concept of History,” the opening thesis of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”45 Benjamin uses the story of the mechanical Turk as an allegorical critique of a crude sort of Marxist historical materialism animated by a “crypto” or hidden theology. As Benjamin describes, a chess board “automaton” is constructed to appear that a puppet in Turkish clothing sitting at a [End Page 448] chess board can somehow win every time against any human opponent. However, a system of mirrors hides a “hunchbacked dwarf” who is an expert chess player, sitting inside. He is hidden under the table, controlling the Turkish puppet with strings. The visible puppet, suggests Benjmain, is historical materialism, while the real player, the disfigured dwarf, small and “ugly” and kept out of site, is theology. In other words, crude and mechanistic historical materialism, appealing to developments in history like laws of nature and so “winning every time” against autonomous human agency, is secretly animated by theological concepts. Its animating theology is kept hidden, unpopular in the “Age of Reason,” which nevertheless provides direction and meaning, the very idea of progress and hope in history.
In a similar vein, reading Adorno as an inverse theologian suggests that Adorno relies transcendently on a concept of redemption or that a concept of redemption regulates his philosophy, even if this concept is gutted of its religious connotation. Here we can discern an echo of Carl Schmitt’s claim that political concepts are secularized theological concepts, and that by extension, as a kind of political theology, Adorno uses theological concepts in secular form as critical tools for social critique. Hidden at the core of the inverse theological reading is the idea that Adorno’s philosophy relies on a type of transcendentalism implied by the concept of redemption, which functions as an essential, even if only essentially negative, orienting factor in his philosophy. However, this risks turning Adorno’s philosophy into a systems-philosophy which has a foundation, or needs a foundation, to make sense of its parts. This slips into the very territory Adorno seeks to circumvent—universalizing or ontologizing the non-identical, the qualified “limit-concept” of negative dialectics.
4.3—Adorno the Negative Theologian
Adorno’s philosophy is argued to be a negative theology because, like Maimonides, he pursues higher truths negatively, by what cannot be said, and negates falsely positive claims. Truth, like redemption, can only be known negatively. David Kaufmann, for example, argues that Adorno draws heavily on Jewish theology, in that he doesn’t provide a logos of God or theology, which is consistent with negative theology’s approach of not discussing God directly.46 Thus Adorno’s philosophy is “fiercely theological” and consistent with negative theology.47 For Kaufmann, Adorno’s “theology” [End Page 449] turns out to be a “necessary thought concept,” a regulative function that is required “for any (correct) account of the world.”48
Gordon also suggests the merits of the comparison of Adorno’s philosophy to negative theology, though argues that ultimately it breaks down, as he claims Adorno applies his method even to the concept of God. On Gordon’s reading, non-identity becomes the secularized God concept and, exploding the myth of total immanence, becomes “an important guide for social criticism.”49 “Negative theology,” Gordon writes, “completes itself in negative dialectics.”50 I take Gordon to mean that, by negating even the concept of God—replacing it with a concept of radical non-identity—Adorno secularizes theological content to the core and thereby effects its total transformation. This reading seems to encompass inverse theology, placing it within a broader objective.
The problem with reading Adorno’s philosophy as negative theology or as its completion concerns the core negativity of Adorno’s philosophy: like inverse theology, non-identity as Adorno’s negative principle is posited like a grounding for his philosophy. This risks essentializing his claims about damaged life, and so also, the negativity in negative dialectics. It loses sight of the central constellation of Adorno’s approach. Adorno’s core negativity is a changing historical trace of non-identity between subject and object, reason and nature, which is both constituting and determining, not something like an abstract ruling principle that can be anticipated in advance or predicted as an outcome, giving meaning to the system.
Thus, when Adorno claims in Minima Moralia that “the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters,”51 I don’t think he is affirming a wholly secular reading of his philosophy, or that his use of theological redemption is merely rhetorical, or that it suggests a crypto-theology, an inverted theology, a negative theology, or a political theology. On my reading, what’s critical about Adorno’s standpoint of redemption is not the standpoint of redemption, and whatever substance this concept entails or not, but rather, the standpoint of redemption. In other words, Adorno does not affirm some fixed state of redemption or some essential state of non-identity itself as the standpoint of critique—suggesting, perhaps, that his philosophy is really an affirmation of God or, conversely, the immanent liquidation of the “God concept”—which provides our only resource for social criticism. Neither does it suggest he employs redemption as an “as if” counterfactual appeal to give us hope. Rather it is the framework for [End Page 450] critique itself that has the redemptive potential to axially shift us out of the constellation where instrumental reason reigns. Theological language is part of the constellation that releases radical nonidentity in this way, at least in Adorno’s demonstration, and this reading resists reducing his use of theology to merely theological or secular “positions.”
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I have sought to review two-tracks of theological significance in Adorno’s philosophy, as well as three positions that take different views of the question of Adorno and theology. My review of the first, supported by my reconstructive efforts, shows that by the terms of Adorno’s philosophy we cannot dismiss his theological language, view it as mere rhetoric, or treat it as a means serving other ends. Reading Adorno’s theological usages by the logic of inverse or negative theology, on the other hand, risks construing radical non-identity as a foundational or regulative principle, outside of the logic of historical constellations—the explicit model of negative dialectics. This leaves us to ask: What would it mean to understand radical non-identity, even in its theological expression within Adorno’s philosophy, in constellational terms rather than foundational ones?
Habermas recently claimed, praising Gordon’s recent work on Adorno, that “the deepest and darkest thought” of early Frankfurt school theorists was, “How to save the truth content of religious traditions for the sake of secular modernity while denying at the same time its very foundation in religious belief?”52 However, this framing does two things that I believe run counter to Adorno’s approach. First, it instrumentalizes theology for the sake of, as being in service to, secular modernity, and second, while it goes after nonfoundationalism, it carries forward a foundational model. Adorno’s philosophy then is read as itself demonstrating a process of secularization, as a migration of theological content into the “profane” for the sake of “secular” reason, and there remains a preoccupation with secular reason’s foundational validity sourced from theological truth. I believe Adorno’s philosophy resists these two strokes and instead suggests a model for theological truth content that on the one hand is nonfoundational, and on the other, is not just a means serving other ends.
These complications are exemplified in Habermas’s “translation proviso,” according to which religious citizens in pluralistic, post-secular [End Page 451] societies bear the burden of translating the content of their beliefs into generally accessible language when participating in public deliberation within the democratic state.53 Habermas’s goal is a variation on the Kantian idea that we recognize ourselves as the authors of laws we are governed by, thereby viewing those laws as legitimate. But the burden is on religious citizens to translate their religious foundational beliefs into secular reasons. The use of theological truth is its instrumentalization on the way to articulate secular reasons. This one-sided instrumentalization is made sense of within a framework of foundational validity.
Adorno calls to give the Copernican revolution an “axial turn,” to such a degree that we are moved out of foundationalism itself. This allows us to view concepts, whatever their genealogy and heritage—theological or secular—by the power they have against current empirical instantiations of their concept. We might then, in practice, find shared ground between otherwise competing and irreconcilable foundational concepts. Take for example the concept of equality. One can argue this concept derives from both theological and secular frameworks. Equality can rest in theological foundations, as in (by some traditions) we are all created equally in the image of God, or it can be supported by a secularized account of human rights, which has already entered public discourse and secular legislative institutions. We can take up empirical examples of the failure of this concept in an evaluative stance against its specific instantiations and argue for different and better applications of equality, regardless of the concept’s origin. The result is more akin to an interlocking constellation of versions of this concept that complement each other, rather than a warring-out over which foundational system holds the certain key to unlocking the normative validity and grounds of this concept. It also underscores the need to be sensitive to the very different instantiations of concepts over place and time.
For Adorno, a concept does not denote something true about an independently existing world, and so its deployment has no guaranteed results. The knowledge context that sustains a concept is the only test, and our social practices shape and alter concepts socially and historically. The concept of equality, for example, might in some contexts be a powerful tool, a critical leverage to increase freedom and rights. In another context, however, the concept of equality might work against these same goals, taken as a leveling out of differences, a setback to increasing freedom and rights. In other contexts, this concept might even fall flat—the concept of equality may have no immanent potential to draw from. We must use concepts to [End Page 452] know their effect, and their effects change how we use them. A desirable or less desirable outcome cannot be assured in advance.
Adorno’s activation of theological language from within his constellational model moves the emphasis away from foundational validity and toward a concern with the potential of concepts in practice. When we look at ideals like freedom and equality or even concepts like redemption through the lens of their foundational validity, we are igniting the question of their ontological and metaphysical status, the truth of things as they exist “out there,” foundational claims that automatically conflict with other irreconcilable foundations. Adorno’s model of constellation demonstrates a shifting of focus away from foundations and toward the social practice of these ideals, which is always in a historical and changing process.
As Gordon frames it, this hits on the key question for those engaging with Adorno’s philosophy: “Can the appeal to experience be harmonized with the demand for validation?”54 Solving this question, by his estimation, requires the monumental effort of “reconciling the two major currents of thought that have run through the history of critical theory over the past one hundred years.”55
I do not presume to bridge this divide. Yet, against Gordon’s framing, I would argue that Adorno shifts the very rules by which these problems arise. We can approach validity and justification through the lens of foundations, or we can understand them outside a foundationalist paradigm. The search for validity within a system that depends on a foundation inevitably faces the same issue: no foundation is secure enough. This leaves us with either a struggle between irreconcilable, incommensurate foundational claims or a mere genealogy of power.
Adorno offers a different model. Rather than proposing a foundational concept to support a system that requires one, he rejects the need for such a framework in the first place—viewing that “need” as part of the pathic paradigm of instrumental reason and the endless, destructive drive for certainty that his philosophy seeks a way beyond.
Still, Adorno’s corrective might seem just as idealized as Habermas’s. The leap from warring foundations to a genuinely pluralistic, evaluative stance in practice appears almost utopian today. Adorno recognizes the enormity of this shift, framing utopia itself as a “togetherness of diversity”56 that moves beyond identity and contradiction—breaking free from the foundationalist paradigm rather than seeking to resolve it within its own terms. The difficulty with Adorno’s diagnoses and remedies is that [End Page 453] it requires a radical shift out of the dominant mode of instrumental rationality. He requires us to intensify our “subjectivity” such that we make the “axial” shift out of the fraud of “constitutive subjectivity.” Perhaps the success of Habermas’s model presupposes the realization of the Adornoian epistemological critique that would move us out of foundationalism. Adorno’s diagnostics and remedies, however, entail an indu-vial and cultural shift that cannot be guaranteed. It is a precarious option, requiring concerted efforts to correct a deeply rooted, even pre-reflective epistemological myth.
In this article I have not claimed to uncover something hidden in Adorno’s writings or to show that Adorno is sympathetic to a conventional understanding of religion or theology. I have aimed to contribute to a growing debate that tries to make sense philosophically of theological aspects of Adorno’s thought and how this relates to broader and more studied themes in his work. By reconstructing what these theological aspects are and how they fit with his theoretical aims, I hope to have clarified and resituated Adorno’s relevance for contemporary work in critical theory that draws on underdeveloped theological aspects in his philosophy.
While I have only sketched the beginning contours of Adorno’s “theological constellation” for this purpose, even in its nascent form I believe we can see that Adorno challenges the very framework of the Habermasian position and similar others that operate within a problematic framing of foundationalism, even if these positions work to solve problems created by the framework itself. I hope that by highlighting the significance of Adorno’s theological constellation we can see promising directions for research that may add conceptual depth to critical theory’s post-secular concerns.
notes
1. I would especially like to thank John T. Lysaker for his support in the development of these ideas, Pini Ifergan at Bar-Ilan University, and colleagues at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. This research was supported by a Presidential Scholarship at Bar-Ilan University. This article develops material from my dissertation and the concluding chapter of my forthcoming book, Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).
2. See especially Michael Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipation (University Press of America, 2001), 2; Christopher Craig Brittain, The Frankfurt School on Religion (Religion Compass, 2012); and Max Pensky, “Western Marxism: Revolutions in Theory,” in The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, ed. Peter E. Gordon and Warren Breckman (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 2:259–99. Ansgar Martins provides a thorough review of the literature: http://ansgarmartins.de/publikationen/.
3. See Dominique Janicaud, The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (Fordham University Press, 2000); and Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See also Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Polity Press, 2010), widely considered a pivotal point in contemporary Critical Theory’s post-secular turn to religion. The recent publication of the Adorno-Scholem correspondence has also contributed to a growing cottage industry of literature questioning “Adorno’s theology.” Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem: Correspondence: 1939–1969, ed. Asaf Angermann, (Polity, 2021); German edition, Suhrkamp, 2015.
4. Peter Gordon, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020).
5. See Gordon, Adorno’s Secular Theology; and Geoffrey Hale and Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
6. See Carl B. Sachs, “The Acknowledgement of Transcendence: Anti-Theodicy in Adorno and Levinas,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no 3 (2011): 273–94.
7. See Deborah Cook, “Through a Glass Darkly: Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 66–78.
8. See Richard Wolin, The Frankfurt School Revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society (Routledge, 2006); and Ulf Liedke, Naturgeschichte un Religion: Eine theologische Studie zum Religons-Begriff in der Philosophie Theodor W. Adornos (Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1996). Notably, in his later work Horkheimer went so far as to characterize mature critical theory outright as a form of Jewish negative theology. See Ilan Gur-Zeev, “Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic Philosophy, Negative Theology, and Counter-Education,” Policy Futures in Education 8, no 3/4 (2010): 298–314; and David Kaufmann, “Beyond Use, within Reason: Adorno, Benjamin and the Question of Theology,” New German Critique, no. 83 (2001): 151–73.
10. See Asaf Angerman, “The Exile of Metaphysics: Adorno and the Language of Political Experience,” Naharaim 9, no. 1–2 (2015): 179–94; James Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable,” European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2002): 1–25; Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” Polemical Encounters (Brill, 2007), 55–79; and Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles (MIT Press, 1985), 108.
11. Robert Hullot-Kentor writes, “theology penetrates every word . . . right under the surface of all Adorno’s writings.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xi.
12. See for example Ansgar Martins, who provides a thorough review of the literature here: http://ansgarmartins.de/publikationen/.
13. See Adorno’s “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today,” The Kenyon Review 18, no. 3/4 (1996): 236–40; and, with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002) offers critiques of traditional religion and modern religious revival movements, namely that they have become ideology. For discussion see Brittain, Adorno and Theology, 86–88. See also James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism.” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (2007): 157–80.
14. Adorno-Scholem Correspondence, 83. See also James Gordon Finlayson, “On Not Being Silent in the Darkness: Adorno’s Singular Apophaticism” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.
16. Robert Hullot-Kentor, the preeminent translator of Adorno’s texts, explains how Adorno’s mature writings in particular are written “at the limits of German syntax: Articles are deleted, the reference of pronouns is consistently obscure, on occasion irreducibly ambiguous; prepositional objects are as a rule elliptical; the subject of a clause may be deleted and reappear in the form of a relative clause; the reflexive pronoun is deferred until the end of the sentence; the negating nicht may appear, strangely, at the beginning of the sentence; foreign, classical, and archaic terms are constantly used; adverbs are positioned ungrammatically and accordingly accented.” This requires sentences be “re-read and reflected upon,” as any “subjectively imposed order” is only a mask for “chaos.” See Bob Hullot-Kentor, “Introduction of Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural-History,’” Telos 60 (1984): 97–98. Elsewhere he relates, this forms a “nexus through which the parts become binding on each other.” See Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xiv–xv.
19. As quoted by Gordon, on Adorno’s note to Scholem in Migrants in the Profane, 7; see also 96–142.
23. Gordon and Finlayson suggest this also. See their discussion “Notes on Negative Theology and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.” Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. https://www.jhiblog.org/2021/04/29/notes-on-negative-theology-and-adornos-negative-dialectics/
24. See Gordon and Finlayson, “Notes on Negative Theology and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.”
26. A fuller discussion of this history and of the relation between Adorno’s constellation and Benjamin’s “dialectical image” can be found in my forthcoming book, Adorno and the Question of Theology: Religion and Reason Beyond Foundations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). For a discussion and history of the term “dialectical image,” see Steven Helmling, “Constellation and Critique: Adorno’s Constellation, Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” Postmodern Culture 14, no. 1 (2003).
32. According to Adorno: “Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.” Negative Dialectics, 163.
33. For an excellent and critical discussion, see Robert Lanning, “Aspects of Adorno’s Method: Constellations and Images,” In the Hotel Abyss (Brill, 2014), 61–82; and Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, 96.
34. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.
37. Brittain, Adorno and Theology, 2. Steven Wasserstrom takes a similar line. See his “Adorno’s Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Polemical Encounters (Brill, 2007).
39. Adorno, Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Hendry W. Pickford (Columbia University Press, 1998), 302–3.
41. Adorno, Complete Correspondence, 66. As Susan Pritchard has noted, Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard can be seen as a critique of dialectical theology, as well negative theology. See Pritchard, “Bilderverbot Meets Body,” 299.
42. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’ trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.
43. Cook, “Through a Glass Darkly: Adorno’s Inverse Theology,” Adorno Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 66–78.
45. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2006), 389.
49. See Gordon’s interview in Nathan Goldman, “Ghost in the Machine,” Jewish Currents (March 16, 2021), available online: https://jewishcurrents.org/ghost-in- the-machine.
52. Habermas, praise for Peter Gordon, Migrants in the Profane, back of dust jacket.
53. See Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere.” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006). For an excellent compilation of articles discussing this in the context of his latest work, see Constellations 28, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–47.
54. Gordon, A Precarious Happiness, 214–15.
55. Gordon, A Precarious Happiness, 215.
