1232021, issue 2
Almost
Vivian Liska
“Toward the End,”1Minima Moralia’s nal aphorism (§ 153), plays a vital role in the
controversies about the theological dimension of Adorno’s thought. It famously invokes
the “standpoint of redemption” and its “messianic light,” which alone can reveal both
the total negativity of things as they are and, in a dialectic “mirror writing,” disclose how
they should be.
“Toward the End” is studded with expressions that suggest totality: “the only
kind,” “all things,” “no other than the one,” “everything else.” Of course, there are minor
mitigations: the vagueness of “similarly” and “at some point” briey challenge the “wholly”
and the “this alone.” B u t t he “ irrefutable,” t h e “ completed” and t he “fully captured,” the
“entirely impossible,” and the “every possible” prevail. There is only one stark exception:
to perceive the utter blackness of the world, Adorno writes, would “require a standpoint
removed, even if only by the most minuscule degree, from the sphere of the spell of being.”
But Adorno presents this necessity as the epitome of the impossible.
Both the totalizing gestures and Adorno’s characteristic dialectical somersaults
culminate in the aphorism’s nal sentence, where the imperative addressed to philoso-
phy to stare into the depths of the abyss is deprived of its initial theological perspective.
Here the “standpoint of redemption” is nothing but a chimera designed to ensure the
totality of the demand. Yet a single word in this nal sentence slightly but fundamentally
unsettles this revocation: “the question concerning the reality or unreality of redemp-
tion itself ” is, Adorno writes, “almost irrelevant.”
The rich and variegated afterlife of Minima Moralia’s nal aphorism—and with
it the very question as to where not only redemption, but God himself resides in
Adorno’s thought—can be measured by the fate of this “almost,” especially where it
is most tellingly absent. Those who seek to recuperate the aphorism for a Christian
“Theology of the Cross” (Kreuzestheologie, Thaidigsmann 1984) ignore the “almost.” So
do those who take the diametrically opposite view that ingeniously undoes any trace
of transcendence in arguing that “the messianic light in which the world will one day
appear need not shine from an outside source at all” (Truskolaski 2017, 210) Giorgio
Agamben likewise ignores the “almost” in accusing Adorno of politico-theological
quietism and his aphorism of a “melancholic reverie” (Truskolaski 2017, 208), a
conjuring-up of a merely aesthetic “seat of divine grace” (Agamben 2005, 35-38). Jacob
Taubes explicitly ignores the “almost” in his sharp critique of Adorno’s text and of his
thought altogether. For Taubes, Adorno’s aphorism presents redemption as an aestheti-
cizing “empty ction” and oers the entire idea of the messiah as “a comme-si,” a mere
“as if.” Blind to the wording of the text, Taubes writes that, for Adorno, it is “ganz
gleichgültig, ob es wirklich ist” (Taubes 2003, 104) – “it is totally irrelevant whether it
really exists.”
Adorno may have left the exact function of his “almost”—a word that inher-
ently undoes totality—deliberately in the dark, as though to deny the book any nality
or closure. It can be conceived in light of a Kantian idea of God as a metaphysically
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1
groundless yet necessary postulate to warrant the moral life. But it can also point to a
less enlightened illumination: to say that the Wirklichkeit (reality) of a “Standpunkt der
Erlösung” is only almost irrelevant is to open a crack through which the messianic light
can shine through. At the end of Minima Moralia Adorno might thus be opening up a
minimal space in which he concedes the possibility that a divine standpoint matters.
And, almost, that it exists.
Notes
Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia. Reflections
a Damaged Life. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott.
London/New York: Verso.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time that Remains:
A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans.
Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Richter, Gerhard. 2006. “Aesthetic Theory and
Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno.”
New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006):
119-135.
Taubes, Jacob. 2003. Die Politische Theologie des
Paulus. München: Fink.
Thaidigsmann, Edgar. 1984. “Der Blick der Erlösung:
Zu Adornos letztem Aphorismus in den Minima
Moralia.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 81
(4): 491-513.
Truskolaski, Sebastian. 2017. “Inverse Theology:
Adorno, Benjamin, Kafka.” German Life and
Letters 70 (2): 192-210.
Vivian Liska is Professor of German literature
and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies
at the University of Antwerp, Belgium as well as
Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the
Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on
Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin) and
co-editor of Arcadia. International Journal of Literary
Studies. Her books include When Kafka Says We.
Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature
(Indiana UP, 2009) and German-Jewish Thought and its
Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana UP, 2017).
I use Gerhard Richter’s English translation in
(2006). All the references to “Zum Ende” are taken
from this text, which offers a valuable corrective to
the English version of “Zum Ende” in Adorno 2005.
References
Biography
