ABSTRACT
T. W. Adorno's nonexistent object, while reckoning with its absence, is nonetheless given greater and greater imaginary materiality and consistency. Even if instrumental reason, along with a burgeoning relativism that opposes that reason, grow absolute, Adorno's certainty about absolutism is itself absolute. Adorno never really maintained a faith in language, in the possibility of speech, perhaps just silent resistance, isolated reflexivity, at best conscious nonparticipation. Adorno becomes interested in the "suspended quality associated with Hegel's philosophy" what is at stake in Hegel's writing and its unfolding dialectic. Adorno is the supposed subject of knowledge situated in the place of the analyst in the transference. Semblance, fiction, can have just as much bearing as the long sought after thing-in-itself. This is perhaps one truth that J. Lacan and Adorno incontestably share. Adorno's claim then is that semblance disenchants the disenchanted world.
