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c h a p t e r 1 Without Soil: A Figure in Adorno’s Thought Alexander Garcı́a Düttmann For David Roberts What is the target of the critique practiced by Adorno? Adorno’s critique is targeted at what exists. But not because what exists is not as it should be, because it must be changed and instituted in some other way. In that case, critique would fall between what exists and what does not yet exist. It would be critique of what exists in the name of what does not yet exist. A critique that targets what exists sets its sights on what exists as such; and therefore also on attempts to hold fast to what exists, to insist on it, to repeat and to prolong the existence of what exists in a gesture that, in holding fast to it, holds it fast. Nothing that exists, nothing that insists on a thing’s existence, can be exempted from critique, regardless of which existing thing is at issue, how it is historically and socially conditioned, and thus how it falls under the sway of some other existing thing. To the same extent that what exists is inseparable from the gesture that, insisting on holding fast to it, insistently holds it fast, since this gesture first opens up a passage to it or even transforms it into an existing thing, safeguarding the existence on which it insists; to the same extent that, vice versa, the gesture of holding fast always insists on what exists; to that extent critique is called forth by what exists, by the existing thing whose continued existence proves to be the object of insistence. 10 11 Alexander Garcı́a Düttmann ‘‘The ‘yes, but’ answer to the critical argument,’’ Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, ‘‘the refusal to have anything wrested away—these are already forms of obstinate insistence on existence, forms of a clutching that cannot be reconciled with the idea of rescue in which the spasm of such prolonged self-preservation would be eased. Nothing can be saved unchanged , nothing that has not passed through the portal of its death.’’1 To be sure, it seems at first as if Adorno were following the usual schema here. What exists attracts critique owing to its particular constitution, and the repudiation of the ‘‘critical argument’’ that in turn targets such critique equates to an unreflective insistence upon what exists: a rationalization. But the idea of rescue deployed against this schema, as the ‘‘innermost impulse of man’s spirit,’’ the talk of a transformation that could not be more far-reaching and perfect because it passes through death, traversing the ‘‘portal’’ of death, as Adorno writes with reference to Job and the Psalter , but also to dialectics, affects the schema, forcing the reader to suspend its mode of operation. For if the relation of thought to its object and to what exists is ultimately one of rescue, a release from the ‘‘spasm’’ of selfpreservation , if critique consequently has its measure in rescue, then it is the task of the critic to help release self-preservation from both forms of its spasmodic prolongation, that of its petrification and that of its obstinacy . Self-preservation becomes petrified with regard to what exists, the existing subject and the existing object; obstinately it insists on what exists, on itself—as subject and object. The insistence on existence ‘‘prolongs’’ self-preservation, which, in insisting on what exists, celebrates its first triumph over transience and, at the same time, through its defense of what exists, concedes the semblance of its triumph. The ‘‘spasm’’ does not set in after the event as an epiphenomenon. Without knowing it, the ‘‘yes, but’’ encounters itself again in what exists. The critic alone knows of this self-encounter. Were rescue to transform something that exists illegitimately in order to perpetuate something that exists legitimately, it would be robbed of its meaning, it would for its part prolong the ‘‘yes, but’’ and be just as much a defense as this; the ‘‘surrender’’ in which rescue is said first to touch upon its meaning, and that is supposed to be even that of spirit, hence the surrender of rescue itself,2 would be nothing but a final appropriation, a final insistence on what exists. The perfect transformation that is rescue, and in whose service critique stands, thus cannot result in the institution of something that exists, in the petrification of its self-preservation and in the...

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