ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an uncanny, obsolete, or discarded mode of definitions in order to wrench the question of possibility out of the two modalities in which it is generally understood in relation to necessity, namely, the pre-Modern and Modern ones. Even when the radical epistemic distinction between the pre-Modern and Modern status of definitions is acknowledged, with very few exceptions, what is taken to be historical is decidedly other than natural, and depends upon a linear understanding of history as a homogenous continuum. There is a contradiction at the center of Modernity and the Enlightenment that can be overcome only by displacing the question of the possibility of freedom—hope from history and politics to metaphysics, thereby also severing freedom from happiness. As Adorno states at the end of "Notes on Kafka," "Kafka reacts in the spirit of enlightenment to its reversion into mythology.
