ABSTRACT
I In Chapter 5, my argument turned somewhat aside from the detailed exposition of de Man’s writing. My aim was to suggest ways in which his work might relate not only to Derrida’s but to other modern forms of critical or negative hermeneutics. Adorno provides perhaps the most useful analogy, with his relentless insistence (as against Hegel) that “the whole is the false,” that thinking must reject all premature absolutes, and that truth resides only in those discrepant details-those stubbornly material signs and tokens-that cannot be reduced to any grand synthesizing scheme. There is also, in Adorno, a distinction between the false and the presently, contingently untrue which corresponds closely to that in de Man between mere “mistakes” and significant “errors.” Such is the function of immanent critique, as Adorno conceives it: to redeem those moments of authentic untruth in art and philosophy which correspond to nothing real in our present, distorted, and indigent condition, but which nonetheless possess a power of revealing what truth might be if things were otherwise. Such thinking, he writes,
This is what leads Adorno-as it leads de Man-to reject all forms of that potent aesthetic ideology which promises to reconcile subject and object, mind and nature, concepts and sensuous intuitions. For Adorno, “the picture of a temporal or extra-temporal original state of happy identity between subject and object is romantic-a wishful project at times, but today no more than a lie.”2 Such claims can only be false in so far as they locate this ideal condition either in a purely mythological past (like the commonplace misreadings of Rousseau), or in an equally mythic present that transcends all the obstacles created by a far from ideal reality. For Adorno, the measure of authentic thinking is its willingness to face up to this knowledge of its own inescapable predicament. “Every thought which is not idle…bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation.”3
