ABSTRACT
If the underlying impulse to freedom is given an idealist, pre-temporal cast, it cannot bring the first two views into a cogent relation with each other. If the underlying freedom represented in the ‘jolt’, the ‘impulse’, the ‘flash of light’, is simply an echo from a time before time, it can only be an ‘accidental’ addendum to modern antinomial practices. In themselves, these would have to be seen, as the identitarian critique stipulates, as devoted entirely to the predominance of subsumptive logic and identity, to unfreedom. Because of the dominance of identity and its exclusion of everything beyond it, there would be no ground, other than that of a supplementary, unwarranted assertion, on which to base anything positive within the modern conception of freedom. There is no way of linking the traces of a ‘lost’ freedom in a time before time to a valued temporal freedom today. Were this possible, Adorno would have to limit the writ of the concept in his identitarian critique, which means giving the critique up. He cannot say that the positive aspects of modern freedom in his second view embody the pre-temporal pulse to freedom without undermining the negative critique in his first view. In aligning a pretemporal pulse of freedom to freedom within the modern juridical complex, he would have to concede that his argument concerning identitarian logic is one-sided and incomplete. At the same time, politically, it would be foolish and irresponsible for one who lived through the Nazi period to deny the validity of liberal forms of freedom, limited though they may be.
