- Title
- A totality of ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- Cultural Critique Vol. 83, p. 1-30
- Relation
- http://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/Journals/cultural-critique
- Publisher
- University of Minnesota Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Adorno’s first work in philosophy, the book on Kierkegaard, is rarely, if ever, given the attention it deserves. This is partly due to its nature as one of the most precocious and impenetrable works from a writer who is a challenge at the best of times. But it is also due to the fact that its real subject is theology. Adorno may have subtitled it Construction of the Aesthetic, but a close reading soon reveals that this study of one of the greatest Protestant philosophical theologians has theology as its main target. One may identify both an underlying theoretical basis and the detailed structure of Adorno’s critique. The basis is what I have elsewhere called “theological suspicion”: intimately connected with and in many ways reliant upon Marxist ideological suspicion, Adorno reshapes that practice with an eye on theology. That suspicion operates by means of critical discernment, in which one is constantly on the watch both for the subtle effects of theological modes of thought and for the possible genuine contributions theology may make. The study of the Kierkegaard book is clearly a case of the former exercise of theological suspicion, for Adorno seeks to uncover the theological underlay of Kierkegaard’s philosophical system with a view to demolishing it. For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s effort suffers from two problems. First, it attempts to conceal its theological basis; second, it thereby sublates and dangerously redirects the patterns of power and authority characteristic of theology. Apart from this theoretical basis in theological suspicion, the detailed structure of Adorno's critique follows a two-fold strategy, a pincer movement if you will: the first locates the myth that lies concealed behind the explicit theological material, while the second identifies the impossible paradoxes that disable Kierkegaard’s every effort at dialectics. Having removed the layers beneath which myth has been carefully obscured in Kierkegaard’s work, Adorno moves to pull apart the paradoxes of that system. Throughout, the bulk of Adorno’s argument stays with theology, particularly in the way theology forms the ground of Kierkegaard’s system. But theology turns out to be a treacherous backer, dissolving into mythology at almost every turn. It is then rendered nonsensical by internal paradoxes that fail to respond to the dialectic. As if to complicate the doubled pattern we already have, Adorno makes this move twice, once in the treatment of the spheres and then again with sacrifice. I have structured my assessment accordingly, critically assessing this doppelganger argument in detail.
- Subject
- Theodor Adorno; Soren Kierkegaard; philosophy; theology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1055662
- Identifier
- uon:15914
- Identifier
- ISSN:1534-5203
- Language
- eng
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