Auschwitz as Eschaton: Adorno’s Negative Rewriting of the Messianic in Critical Theory

Introduction

‘God has died. God is dead’, proclaimed Hegel, in a well rehearsed speech. But before any suggestion of resurrection could pass his lips, Nietzsche interrupted: ‘God remains dead. And we have killed him’. ¹

The enormity of Nietzsche’s infamous dictum lies not in his announcement of God’s mortality, nor even in his admission, on behalf of us all, of the crime of deicide; rather, it lies in the fact that his verdict is an interruption. Urgent questions surround the autopsy, proceeding exactly to the script of a crime drama series: the time of death, the identity of the victim, likely murder weapons and key suspects, with matters pertaining to His estate not far behind. Such questions miss the point entirely. Deicide is not a matter of execution, but of foreclosure. What Nietzsche announces is not the discovery of a body – God’s remains – but the interruption of the familiar procession from suffering to redemption, from exile to reconciliation, from trespass to retribution, and from mortality to resurrection. Rather than his repetition of Hegel’s line, it is his confirmation – the second ‘yes’ – that disrupts our thinking of the transcendent: the violence of ‘God remains …’ brings the infinite to an indefinite halt, bolting shut the doors through which the messianic promise might have been delivered. He who transcends death can only be killed by pausing time itself, infinitely prolonging the moment between death and return, which is why the secular is a historicising gesture and vice versa. But pausing time, and keeping it paused, is no mean feat, not least in the face of continual change: for all Nietzsche’s acrobatics, the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which was to serve this interruption, remains largely unthinkable to Western modernity both conceptually and politically. What is illuminated here is the persistent connection between time and theology.

The irresistible passage of time continually threatens to overturn Nietzsche’s verdict, and it is time, rather than God, that is visible in every successive step in the gradual collapse of Western academia’s certainty in ‘secularisation’. Nowhere is this more evident than in International Relations (IR), which has been a latecomer to the recent reassessment of the relevance of religion in the social sciences, ² but all the more vigorous as a result. A substantial literature has emerged in IR, which seeks to correct the discipline’s ‘decades-long failure to take matters of faith seriously’, ³ through a multi-faceted exploration of the sociological, ethical and philosophical role that religion and theological themes continue to play in international phenomena. Debates continue on the extent to which this requires a ‘paradigm shift in IR’ ⁴ , and whether the causes of this apparent neglect are particular to IR or inscribed in the very foundations of Western modernism; ⁵ however, there is a recurrent (though little acknowledged) theme running throughout this literature that I want to highlight here, as it draws attention to the intimate connection between time and theology that is the broader concern of this paper.

The theme in question manifests in two distinct but interconnected ways in the literature on religion and IR. The first is the distinctly eschatological character that authors cannot help using in describing the current shift: terms such as ‘return’ and ‘renaissance’ abound, framing the reassessment of the relationship between religion and international politics as a reunification. After a long period of exile, out in the wastes of disciplinary exclusion, religion is being brought back into the fold. Alternatively, it is IR that plays the role of returning exile, having spent decades in the wilderness of positivism and secularisation, with religion as its salvation. Perhaps belabouring this point, Michael Barnett names it a ‘great awakening’, and asks if IR theorists are ‘about to awake from their long secular slumber and discover that the world has had, continues to have, and always will have a religious dimension’. ⁶ These semantic flourishes, which are commonplace throughout this literature, are pregnant with a deeply theological – and Judeo-Christian, to be precise – concept of time; a concept consisting of the familiar structure of origin, fall, and reconciliation, that Nietzsche so violently disrupts.

The second, deeply connected, instance of this theme revolves around the timing of IR’s ‘return’ to religion. While there was certainly some interest in the connections that could be drawn between IR and religious thought, and terms such as ‘post-secular’ (which is itself temporally encoded) were already part of the academic discourse, it was only after ‘9/11’ that questions of IR’s neglect of religion became a widespread concern. Echoes of this reverberate throughout the literature, to the extent that it is almost a convention to open a contribution on religion and IR with a sentence on the attacks of 11 September 2001. ⁷ The status of this moment as a critical juncture, with enough force to prompt the re-evaluation of an entire discipline, right down to its epistemological roots, is not without eschatological overtones: indeed, the idea that history itself contains not only theologically significant events, but events that disturb the very boundaries between theology and analysis, is a key focus of this paper. The point I want to make here, though, is that the narration of the ‘return’ claims that religion’s sudden explosion onto the scene of IR shows that it was always relevant, even if the discipline denied this. In fact ‘9/11’ – a date that has assumed the status of a proper noun – thus acquires a revelatory character for IR, which sits neatly with the apocalyptic overtones which accompany it. What is important here is that even the narration of why religion is important for IR is framed through a profoundly theological notion of time: after 9/11, the question of religion’s relevance has somehow changed, but this change applies to the past as well as the present.

The point here is that IR’s ‘return’ to religion takes place on a terrain that is permeated by theological concepts of time. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is already dismissed – insofar as it is a suspension of the progression from exile to return – before religion is even mentioned. It is the perseverance and pervasiveness of this theological time that makes the task of overturning the secularisation hypothesis apparently so simple: all that has to be done is to integrate religious identities into pre-existing descriptions of international politics, as a context of action or as an explanatory variable. ⁸ But to settle the debate so cheaply – to simply ignore the historical developments that provoked the term ‘secularisation’ in the first place, by preserving theological concepts of time – is merely to shy away from Nietzsche’s challenge and accusation.

Those branches of IR theory that draw on critical traditions, which may be expected to take Nietzsche more seriously, have also experienced a theological turn in recent decades, in the wake of explicitly theological turns by Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, and Habermas, among others. Rather than approaching religion as something to be included in IR’s attempts to describe and explain, critical IR invokes the theological as something to be mobilised in the service of the critique of capitalist (post-)modernity. ⁹ This emerging view of religion, which preaches awareness both of the theological underside of ostensibly secular Western rationality, and of the spiritual inheritance of philosophies critical of this rationality, ¹⁰ is in this sense strategic: it seeks to invigorate critical theory by enlisting theological transcendence against the brutal immanence of capitalism and positivism – an immanence that forestalls all hope of transformation and emancipation. ¹¹

Again, Nietzsche’s interruption is overruled, restoring time to its proper unity, and reinstating the transcendent promise of salvation that challenges late capitalism’s claims to immutability. A common temptation amongst critical IR theorists – especially those drawing on different generations of the ‘Frankfurt School’ – is to synthesise theology’s promises and their own emancipatory agenda, reconstructing theology as social critique. ¹² Nietzsche is (only ever implicitly) pronounced irrelevant; The Gay Science is conflated with a simplistic belief in the inevitability of ‘secularisation’, which is charged with no longer reflecting the lived experiences of modern global subjects. Thus Scott Thomas asserts:

What is required is not to ignore or marginalise religion, nor is it to promote a kind of secularism that cannot engage with how the people of the global South conduct their moral and social lives. Rather, critical theorists share a variety of insights with theologians, activists and ordinary believers – on peace, justice, emancipation, consumerism and materialism – which underlie the culture of capitalist modernity, even if there may be limitations to the Enlightenment definitions of some of their core concepts. It should now be easier to see, at least provisionally, how living faithfully can be a way of living critically. ¹³

There are two features of this straightforward reintegration of theology and critical theory that desperately demand attention. First of all, it participates in a broader Anglophone reassessment of the Frankfurt School – and particularly of Adorno – that enthusiastically champions their theological inheritance without fully cognising the contradictions and tensions therein. Not least of these contradictions is the identification of the scattered, mournful and negative references to hope, especially in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, as endorsements of faith. ¹⁴ Second, the synthesis of critical theory and theology operates as and through an effacement of Nietzsche – a denial that his interruption, in the long run, captured something important – which is deeply problematic given the place Nietzsche occupied in the thought of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and others.

In what follows, I argue that Adorno navigated a unique path between the Scylla of overturning Nietzsche and the Charybdis of embracing secularism, but that this can only be grasped by abandoning the currently fashionable view of his philosophy as quiet Gnosticism or ‘inverse theology’. Instead, Adorno mobilises theological concepts – especially those deriving from Jewish apocalypticism – in a complex constellation that transfigures and reorders their critical impact. Transcribing Auschwitz as a theological event, Adorno preserves the emancipatory content of Jewish messianism by sublating it into history. As such, it remains a potent and unrecognised model for escaping the traps of ‘post-secular’ critical theory.

Adorno and ‘Theology as Social Critique’

As David Kaufmann has observed, commentaries on Adorno have traditionally secularised his work, either following Habermas in attacking Adorno’s use of theological terminology as an unfortunate lapse, or else ignoring it entirely. ¹⁵ Until recently, the pervading assumption, at least in the Anglophone reception of Adorno’s work, was that his theological inheritance could be quarantined as inessential to his thinking, merely a question of style, of presentation. Even before any examination of the content of Adorno’s references to theology, this assumption must be reproached as deeply inconsistent with his thought. Adorno, like any serious student of Marx, held that ‘the presentation [Darstellung] of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea … Expression is relieved of its accidental character by thought, on which it toils as thought toils on expression’. ¹⁶ The aphoristic essay form, for which Adorno is known, is not a literary affectation but a response in praxis to the anti-systematic content of his philosophy; so too can his theological phraseology be read as participating in the complex negativity of ‘a thinking against itself’, ¹⁷ in which the dichotomies of the Enlightenment – including reason versus revelation – are dialectically unravelled.

Recent reassessments of Adorno’s theological inheritance, however, have done little more than invert the traditional view. The references to theological concepts in Adorno are to be vaunted as the source of his potency, rather than as momentary lapses in his otherwise stringent materialism. ¹⁸ Drawing as much on quotes from his companions in theory, Horkheimer and Benjamin, as from Adorno, this literature interprets negative dialectics as a philosophy of ‘inverse theology’, wherein the concepts and categories of Jewish and Christian religious thought are to be reinvigorated, albeit shorn of their theistic certainty, as transcendent criticisms of late capitalist society. Briefly, the argument runs as follows: Adorno, along with his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, sought to criticise religion’s complicity in prolonging the prevailing conditions of human suffering. Doctrines such as the inevitability of salvation, theodicy, and the heavenly redress of earthly inequalities, were rejected along with the authoritarian foundation of knowledge associated with hierarchical religious institutions. However, this critique of religion is not a secular, demythologising gesture, but is in the service of religion, i.e. ‘for the sake of what the religious prefigures and recalls’. ¹⁹ In contrast to the suffocating immanence of capitalist society and positivist knowledge, in which ‘what is’ progressively annuls ‘what might be’ and therefore also questions of ‘what should be’, theology refers us back to a transcendent way of thinking in which the relentless and brutal ‘realities’ of modern life are revealed as finite and mutable. Those theological concepts that recall suffering, which the culture industry serves to mask and normalise, are to be ‘rescued’ for their contribution to social critique. The ‘inverse theology’ imputed to Adorno springs from the claim that ‘redemption, justice and the messianic … challenge and question society’, and can therefore be mobilised ‘to crack open existing life, to make room for new insights’. ²⁰

This argument – though seductive, given the frequent references Adorno makes to the connection between truth and suffering – requires a great deal of selectivity when it comes to Adorno’s texts, and tends towards a hopeful, and even faithful serenity that is deeply at odds with the fractured, acerbic and restless quality of his writing. For all its useful overturning of the anti-theological reading of Adorno, this literature desperately requires critical commentary, to chart how Adorno’s texts are disfigured and misdirected under the aegis of ‘inverse theology’. There is no space here for such a commentary; however, the key point I want to make regards the exegetical method of this interpretation of Adorno’s work, especially in reference to Christopher Brittan’s Adorno and Theology.

In an oft-cited passage, Robert Hullot-Kentor observes that ‘theology is always moving right under the surface of all of Adorno’s writings … [and] penetrates every word’. ²¹ While he approvingly cites this passage in opening up the question of Adorno’s ‘inverse’ theology, Brittan’s interpretive focus is exclusively on the explicit references to theological motifs in Adorno’s works and correspondence. ²² It may seem rather pithy to insist on a disjuncture here, but it points to a complicated issue that is crucial for properly understanding the import of Adorno’s critical theory. To focus on Adorno’s occasional explicit discussions of theological themes, assembling them into a coherent approach to thinking theologically, misses the insight that Hullot-Kentor directs us towards. Theology is not a set of discourses and ideas that can be imported into philosophical and critical thought, mobilised to fill gaps and illuminate subtle themes; rather, for Adorno, theological conceptuality is already present even in the most sterile rationalism; indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment revolves around precisely this.

To reintegrate theology into philosophy is to uncritically accept the prevailing doctrine of their separation, rather than comprehend this separation as historically mediated. ²³ Moreover, the ascription to Adorno of a strict dichotomy between the arid immanence of secular reason and the potent transcendence of theology misses the crucial thrust of his philosophy. Adorno repeatedly stresses that critical theory cannot claim for itself some transcendent perspective from which to challenge society, but must proceed through immanent critique, inhabiting and undoing from within the conceptuality of late capitalism. For Adorno, secular conceptuality is replete with ‘emphatic concepts’ that point beyond the confines of the society that creates them. ²⁴ Concepts such as freedom, individuality, identity, equal exchange, and so on, are integral to capitalist society’s functioning, but at the same time exceed that society:

The meaning of Marx’s economics is … that he starts out from just that element in bourgeois political economy which is more than descriptive (fair exchange). And that he shows that the society that develops on the basis of such principles contradicts these principles, whist the realization of these principles would supersede [aufheben] the form of society itself … he takes from bourgeois society the measures of legality which it has itself constituted, shows that bourgeois society cannot fulfil them, and retains this measure at the same time as a negative expression of a right constitution of society. This is just what we need to do with respect to bourgeois categories like that of the individual. ²⁵

Even the concepts of positivism – the archetype of supposedly sterile and anti-utopian descriptivism – are deeply emphatic. Indeed, the entirety of Negative Dialectics may be read as an attempt to realise that cornerstone of positivism: ‘experience’. It is precisely the fact that capitalist modernity and identity thinking are riddled with concepts that point towards their own insufficiency that makes immanent critique possible: ‘If the system were not inherently self-critical there would be no reason to criticize it’. ²⁶ This casts a significant doubt over the ‘inverse theology’ argument, which rests on the claim that theology is the only source of conceptual challenges to capitalism and its reflexes in theory – a doubt which is exacerbated by the fact that Adorno also reserved a similar (though heavily qualified) role for art and music, making theology just one of a plethora of ‘cracks’ in existing life.

If Adorno’s theological inheritance is to be reinstated as something significant, we must go further than attempting to reconstruct and defend a coherent ‘approach’ to theology from a few scattered aphorisms. Rather, the task is to comprehend the way in which Adorno attempts an immanent critique of a society that is itself permeated by repressed theological concepts. If it is not to fall into the trap of assuming some transcendent perspective from which to judge history from the outside, critical theory must be marked ‘by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world’. ²⁷ In this way, the same contradiction that inhabits contemporary thought about the theological must – as the very condition of its validity – not be summarily excised by critical theory. Understanding Adorno’s theological inheritance thus requires a more complex hermeneutic, composed of tracing the theological undercurrent in his work, through the ripples and eddies – contradictions – that are periodically visible on the surface. Specifically, we must examine the ways in which Adorno identifies and reconfigures these contradictions as productive encounters within negative dialectics. This requires no longer assuming that the theological terms that he uses are assimilated, whole, into an ‘inverse theology’, but instead tracing the way that Adorno inherits and refashions the theological tradition that he places himself in; namely, historical materialism.

Historical Materialism: from Atheism to Theology?

To speak of historical materialism as a theological tradition is somewhat heretical: Marx’s attitude towards religion was remarkably unambiguous, and barely changed throughout the winding development of his thought; religion, for Marx, is a historically constituted illusion that projects human self-alienation onto an imaginary, spiritual plane. ²⁸ Religion is a necessary product of an inverted world in which relations between human beings appear to them as relations between things (commodities); it is ‘the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form’. ²⁹ In this way, the criticism of religion is the necessary starting-point of all social critique – the ‘presupposition of all criticism’ ³⁰ – just as the associated ‘disillusionment’ is a necessary step in awakening the revolutionary potential of the working class. While he asserts that religion is not a simple mechanism of oppression, that it is also ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances’, ³¹ Marx agrees with Feuerbach that philosophy, up to and including Hegel, ‘is nothing but religion conceptualized and rationally developed; and … it is equally to be condemned as another form of and mode of existence of human alienation’. ³²

Lest we mistakenly turn Marx into Dawkins, it is important to note here that when Marx writes of the abolition of religion, he does not mean anything as straightforward or simplistic as asserting the truth of atheism in opposition to the truth of religion. Rather, religion is to undergo a Hegelian sublation [Aufhebung]: if religion is understood as alienated or ‘externalized human self-consciousness’, it is a negative impression of the self-consciousness that historical materialism and communist revolutionary praxis work towards, and as such must be negated in order to realise its truth content. The truth that religion expresses is the necessity, if truth is to mean anything at all, of a self-conscious, self-creating being. ³³ From the perspective of a humanity that has shattered the inverted world of capitalism (and in so doing, has become self-consciously self-creating), the need to posit such a being outside and above the human world, has dissolved. ‘Atheism … has no longer any meaning’. ³⁴ In this way, Marx replaces Hegel’s mystical ‘World Spirit’ with revolutionary human praxis, but preserves its historical function as the negation of the separation between the spiritual and the human world. ³⁵ Contrary to readings that cast him as a straightforward atheist (a misreading perpetrated by defenders and detractors alike), Marx understands religion as illusory, but it is a real illusion: it is the false expression of truth at a historical moment – the inverted, fetishistic order of capitalism – in which truth cannot appear, as long as human subjectivity remains structured by the self-alienation that creates and feeds capitalism. Marx might be expected, therefore, to share Nietzsche’s horror at the death of God, as the inverted truth of religion has merely been annulled, rather than realised through the revolutionary negation of religion. ³⁶

The debate over Marx’s theology has persisted, in spite of his consistent identification of the theological as an expression of self-alienation. This persistence emerges from the many similarities between, on the one hand, Marx’s apocalyptic vision of history and humanity’s redemption by revolution, and on the other hand, Judeo-Christian messianic eschatology. While some continue to deny the eschatological content in Marx’s writings, ³⁷ perceiving it to be a threat to the validity of his work, a more fruitful approach has sought to understand the significance and contribution of eschatology to historical materialism. Writing during, or in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes all recognised the continuity that stretched from biblical apocalyptics, through Hegel, to Marx. ³⁸ In opposition to the vulgar-Marxist reception of his work as the independent foundations of a new science, these authors understood Marx as embedded in a series of critical dialogues: just as Capital, as suggested by its subtitle, is not a self-contained theory of political economy but ‘a critique of political economy’, so Marx’s philosophy of history does not spring from empirical observations but from a sustained, life-long critical engagement with Hegel.

What is distinctive about Marx’s eschatology is that it is historical necessity that pushes bourgeois society to its apocalyptic end, and this end is nothing other than the abolition of the rule of necessity. The communist revolution is inevitable, guaranteed, but its accomplishment entails humanity’s deliverance from the realm of necessity – by necessity – and into the realm of freedom. ³⁹ Necessity – in the form of a quasi-mechanic unfolding of internal contradiction – usurps the role of divine providence, but unlike the latter, it is not to survive the end it drives toward. The influence of Hegel is unmistakeable, in that the promise of history does not come from outside, but is internal to it, and yet Marx is also rebelling against Hegel’s Gnostic vision of history’s fulfilment as the oneness of human beings, released from their mortal and material particularity, with God. ⁴⁰ Marx inherits Hegel’s philosophy of history by demystifying its end point: the messianic promise of historical materialism does not consist in freeing humanity from its bodily, earthly and political existence, but rather in reconciling this existence with freedom, through the negation of self-alienation.

Marx thus constructs a total contrast between the before and after of the communist revolution: on the one side, a pre-history of self-alienating humanity consisting of an inexorable (though dialectical) process of development; on the other, a true history of a self-authoring, self-conscious humanity. In this way, Marx’s apocalypticism is no mere strategy, designed to sustain revolutionary movements with the conviction that they do the work of history. Instead, apocalypticism offers a way to conceptualise the absolute difference between present and future, without severing the relationship between them. ⁴¹ Marx’s apocalypticism functions to dispel undialectical notions that bourgeois ‘liberty’ is anything other than ideological (the capitalist, for Marx, is as much an automaton as the wage-labourer); while at the same time denouncing the view that real human freedom is impossible. Through his apocalyptic eschatology, Marx disconnects teleology – itself an eschatological concept – from determinism. Teleology belongs only to the ‘pre-historical’ present, to the realm of necessity that is comprehensible through historical analysis; after the proletariat fulfil their messianic destiny, teleology ceases to have any meaning. In this way, the common complaint that Marx lacks a specific image of communist society ⁴² entirely misses the point. The rule of historical necessity – teleology – that makes the past and present knowable, is precisely what would be absent after a successfully completed communist revolution. Insofar as apocalypticism governs Marx’s absolute distinction between the teleological past/present and the non-teleological future, eschatology is the epistemological, as well as the ethical basis of historical materialism. Rather than being distinct concerns, the ethical and epistemological are conjoined in Marx’s atheistic eschatology, as it is only the End, or horizon of history, that gives history its meaning and intelligibility. Indeed, this is how eschatology has always functioned: ‘Not only does the eschaton delimit the process of history by an end, it also articulates and fulfils it by a definite goal’. ⁴³

Marx’s teleological apocalypticism enables him to radicalise Hegel’s eschatology, and infuse historical materialism with a potent sense of purpose and an indignation that it would perhaps otherwise lack. But while it is intellectually and politically productive, apocalypticism is also dangerously intoxicating. History is littered with those whose lives have been ruined by apocalyptic prophecies; not by prophecies fulfilled, but those unsatisfied. The fate of those who gave away all possessions, quit jobs and severed social ties, under the influence of Harold Camping’s numerological prediction of the rapture’s coming on the 21 May 2011, and then later on the 21 October 2011, is only the most recent, tragic example. Marx, who in ‘every political upheaval … glimpsed the summer lightning of impending catastrophe’, ⁴⁴ suffered the fate of all apocalyptics: continual disappointment with the progress of European revolutions. Even more strongly, the history of orthodox Marxism testifies to the dangers inherent in apocalyptic intoxication. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, confident that the monumental task of freeing Russians from poverty and backwardness would be mitigated by the impending European, if not global, communist revolution. When bourgeois society proved to have far more time left than Marxist prophecies suggested, apocalyptic certainties were purged along with dissent, as revolution gave way to reaction and bureaucracy; Marx’s apocalypticism made an unthinkable revolution possible, but at the same time condemned it to repeat the same fate as the Christian Church, which, tired of waiting, purged itself of St. Paul’s apocalypticism and transformed into an institution at the very heart of the empire that once persecuted it.

Such tragedies are inseparable from teleological apocalypticism. An awareness of this is what led Walter Benjamin to propose his non-teleological, anti-historicist ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. ⁴⁵ Benjamin self-consciously inherits Marx’s eschatology by reconfiguring it, just as Marx did with Hegel. Whereas for Marx, (pre-)history has a determinate end which will give way to a very different future, Benjamin inscribes this future as a messianic potential that attends to – or, in Derrida’s formulation, haunts – history in all its moments. Rather than being a procession that necessarily breaks off at a specific point, history for Benjamin is a continuum that revolutionary action and historical materialist analysis seek to ‘blast open’. ⁴⁶ The certainty of apocalypticism gives way to an ‘openness’ to the messianic potential of specific events, movements and works.

What is significant about Benjamin’s intervention, especially in the context of understanding Adorno’s theological heritage, is that he rejects the theodicy latent in Marx’s eschatology. Every event, both past and future, that participates in the dialectical unfolding of historical necessity, no matter how horrific, finds its champion in Marx. As an ethical principle, teleological apocalypticism is highly suspect. Benjamin’s messianism, by contrast, aims not just at redemption as a future state but the redemption of the past:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one … Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. ⁴⁷

What is at stake in revolutionary thought and practice is not the fulfilment of historical necessity, but a contestation over the meaning of the past, which is to be redeemed from its subservience to the ruling class. In place of Marx’s apocalypse, which simultaneously differentiates and connects the past and the future, Benjamin places remembrance at the centre of his eschatology: the unification of the oppressed of the present and the oppressed past into a constellation that explodes the illusions of the present. Again, the function of eschatology is preserved; the messianic eschaton – though no longer fixed and guaranteed – promises to flood all of history with a different light to that with which bourgeois historicism selectively catalogues the past. ‘Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’. ⁴⁸

What is lost, however, in Benjamin’s anti-historicist revision of historical materialism, is its ethical foundation within history. The messianic is invoked as the hope of history in the name of the oppressed, but the status of oppression as evil is simply assumed as self-evident. Benjamin’s historical constellations are a creative and emancipatory form of knowing, but their orientation against class oppression, against rule, and not against some other relation or form of injustice, is predicated on a rather general equation of history as the history of oppression. The question of ethical foundations that Benjamin inaugurates has dominated much of critical theory’s subsequent thought on the messianic, through Derrida, Agamben, Badiou and Žižek. ⁴⁹ It has also shaped the recent interpretation of Adorno – Benjamin’s ‘first and only disciple’ – as dependent on Jewish theology to provide the ethical and redemptive moment in his work. A very different interpretation is possible, however, based on a reading of Adorno as not simply imbibing Jewish messianism, but rather negatively reconfiguring it, and Marx, in a similar way as Marx reconfigures Hegel.

Adorno’s ‘After Auschwitz’

The problem that Adorno inherits from Marx, partly through Benjamin, is that eschatology is a pharmakon – both cure and poison. For all its potency for critical thought, its promise of an end to present conditions and its grounding the possibility of radical politics, eschatology also demands that philosophy embrace what is alien to it: faith. It is the strength of his conviction that the proletariat must fulfil its messianic destiny that undermines Marx’s otherwise luminous insight into the nature of capitalism, and it is the weakness of Benjamin’s faith that reduces the messianic promise to a ghost that haunts the present. Two temptations present themselves: on the one hand, affirming with Taubes, and much of the contemporary political theology literature, a return to religion; on the other, exorcising eschatology from our thinking entirely. My argument in what follows is that Adorno – never one to succumb to such blackmail – traces a third possibility through a dialectical gesture which should now be very familiar: the simultaneous preservation and negation (Aufhebung) of eschatology in Auschwitz.

The place of Auschwitz in Adorno’s thought can be easily (and has been repeatedly) misconstrued if it is shorn of its eschatological content – a content that Adorno hints at often through his repetition of the phrase ‘After Auschwitz’, the very phrase that, tellingly, opens the final section of Negative Dialectics. ⁵⁰ Adorno names Auschwitz as the death-knell of theodicy and transcendent meaning. ⁵¹ To affirm a positive direction of history in the face of Auschwitz is abhorrent and unthinkable: to explain Auschwitz away, as an exception or momentary lapse, ‘is somehow absurd in the light of the scale of disaster’, ⁵² and to include it as a necessary moment on the path to redemption would be no less obscene. Nothing less than the collapse of the Enlightenment is written on the walls of the Nazi death-camps:

After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence … Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience. ⁵³

The challenge Adorno presents to philosophy is to take Auschwitz seriously, not just as a historical event but as a concrete denial that philosophy is anything more than ideology and apologia. After Auschwitz, the truth-content of philosophy has irrevocably changed: no longer can it spring from origins, first principles, from the transcendent or universal; instead the measure of philosophy – and, indeed, of culture – is the extent to which it can confront its own complicity in a world where Auschwitz was possible. If philosophy does not, if it fails to identify the ways in which it reproduces and legitimises the possibility of Auschwitz, ‘it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims’. ⁵⁴

For philosophy to take Auschwitz seriously, it must respond to it: in this way, Adorno’s apparent fixation on the death camps is not, as is so often claimed, a retreat into pessimism and despair, ⁵⁵ but rather an urgent rallying call. The ‘inverse theology’ interpretation, discussed above, comes close to taking Auschwitz seriously, in that the theological survives only in a fractured, negative form: ‘any hymns endorsed by his inverse theology would be largely silent and without positive content’. ⁵⁶ But this recognition masks a deeper problem. By claiming that ‘theological concepts like the messianic and redemption serve as a critical protest and challenge to unjust domination and oppression’, ⁵⁷ Brittan makes Adorno guilty of exactly that which he rails against. Theological concepts fulfil this function regardless of the reality of Auschwitz, as the messianic protests against oppression – as it does for Benjamin – in every historical moment. Neither is Auschwitz significant in ‘inverting’ theology, in this version of Adorno’s philosophy, as it ‘is based on his view that submitting to the temptation to secure rationality (or theology) on a firm foundation, forfeits the search for the truth and slides into identity thinking’. ⁵⁸ Auschwitz merely confirms what is already presumed, in accordance with Benjamin’s messianism, as self-evident: the fact of historical oppression and injustice. In this way, the ‘inverse theology’ interpretation marginalises Auschwitz as a merely historical event, rather than taking it seriously as the philosophical catastrophe Adorno explicitly frames it as.

In contrast to Benjamin, Adorno follows Marx in allowing no space outside of history, no perspective that is independent of and untouched by social conditions. Even the oft-cited ‘finale’ to his Minima Moralia – the root of all theological and pessimistic misapprehensions of his work – takes pains to deny this transcendent possibility, even as something negative. Adorno famously invokes the ‘standpoint of redemption’ as the last saviour of philosophy, but what is almost universally omitted by commentators is that, in the same paragraph, he refutes it:

But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but it is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. ⁵⁹

This argument against mobilising the transcendental, no matter how seductive, should be read as a criticism of Benjamin, but it is also a complaint against Marx. Adorno held Marxism to be insufficiently self-critical, unaware of the idealism (in the German philosophical sense) that remained in Marx’s materialist reworking of Hegel. ⁶⁰ The fate of Marx’s eschatology – which idealistically imposes totality and unity onto history and in so doing, encounters teleology not as a cognitive presupposition but as inherent in the material ⁶¹ – bears witness to this. Adorno rejects the theological, transcendent route of invoking the messianic, through equating it with the idealist practice of replacing objectivity with concepts. But as objectivity cannot be known except by concepts – ‘to think is to identify’ ⁶² – the task of critical thought is to trace the object negatively through the contradictions within conceptuality, to ‘strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’. ⁶³ My fundamental claim here is that what Adorno means by ‘After Auschwitz’ is exactly such an attempt, in the context of the concept of thinking through ‘redemption’.

Auschwitz as Eschaton

Rather than affirming the truth of eschatology (as do Marx and Benjamin, and countless more in the critical tradition), or merely denying it (as in positivism and historicism), Adorno negatively appropriates it. He recognises eschatology as a conceptual system, and seeks to amplify rather than resolve its contradictions – through assembling a speculative ‘constellation’ of concepts – as through these contradictions the objective moment that the concepts appropriate and suppress may be at least glimpsed.

‘After Auschwitz’ names the death-camps as eschaton, the culmination of history. Throughout Adorno’s writings on Auschwitz is a sense of heightened horror (usually explained away in biographical terms), that makes a strong ontological claim: Auschwitz is the apocalypse, in the full eschatological sense of being the catastrophic fulfilment of the promise of history. What is negated in apocalyptic eschatology is not its prophetic element, but the positivity of this element. Eschatology retains its function – of fulfilling history and giving it meaning in the form of an end – but in an anti-theodicy: Auschwitz floods the present and history, the world in which such an event is possible, with the light of the eschaton: but it is a sick, appalling light that cannot be looked upon without horror. Eschatology only ever moves ‘under the surface’ of Adorno’s writings, and as such the constellation in which Auschwitz becomes eschaton is never described explicitly; however, this argument is detectable in two motifs of the final part of Negative Dialectics. Through exploring these motifs, Auschwitz’s eschatological status, and the implications of this status, can be fully illuminated.

The Politics of the End

The identification of Auschwitz as eschaton is central to understanding Adorno’s theology. He does not, as recent interpretations suggest, seek to rescue God from Nietzsche’s verdict, at the cost of making Him absent, but neither does he seek a non-theological ground from which to understand the present and its history. Instead, Adorno offers a deeply eschatological vision of Western history disastrously culminating in Auschwitz, a constellation that inherits certain constructions of meaning from Jewish messianism, as well as the secularised form of that tradition running through Hegel, Marx and Benjamin. The historicity of Nietzsche’s verdict finds a more faithful ally in Adorno than in any ‘post-foundational’ discussions of the death of God. For Adorno, the abyss – and the necessity to respond to it – explodes out of history in the form of a concrete, particular, event: ‘After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation. The judgment passed on the ideas long before, by Nietzsche, was carried out on the victims’. ⁷⁶

This abyssal event calls into question every concept that leads in the direction of indifference to particulars. Neither ‘time’, nor ‘history’, nor ‘being’ is innocent in the light of Auschwitz: the theological and transcendent, which tend toward theodicy, are doubly condemned. But where Nietzsche oscillates between horror and glee, hysterically advocating the mythical doctrine of the Eternal Return, Adorno self-consciously retains his reason. The end of history is not its finale, so it is the threat of recurrence that provides the spur to action; it is the imperative to extinguish the possibility of another Auschwitz that dictates the urgency and nature of critical theory’s task. Understood as part of a negative constellation, fusing Auschwitz and eschaton, Adorno’s famous ‘new categorical imperative’ is revealed as something other than the political programme it is conventionally interpreted as. The claim that a ‘new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’, ⁷⁷ strikes at the core of the critical tradition that traces its lineage to Marx. No longer can the critique of capitalism be content to wait, in hope, or faith, or certainty, for redemption: such hope has become conjoined, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, to exactly that system of thought and practice that the critique invoked redemption against. By constructing a constellation in which Auschwitz is eschaton, Adorno presents an altered, and entirely more thinkable version of Nietzsche’s interruption.

As discussed in the introduction, there is a crucial issue at stake for IR in questions of the death of God, and of the validity of the secular in general. This relates to the way in which the very terms of the debate about religion reverberate with theological tones: inescapably, the concepts, categories and very grammar of Enlightenment reason bear the traces of theological systems of thought from which it emerged. IR cannot hope to understand the rationalities at work in the international – whether liberal, economic, or scientific – without some degree of sensitivity to how their genesis in theological discourses continues to motivate and disrupt them, as contradiction. But to simply collapse them into a catch-all concept of religiousness, of theological culture, is likewise to blind ourselves to the contradiction within the secular. Reintegrating the religious into positivistic or rationalist theorisations of IR, as explanatory variables or levels of description, is merely an inversion of an equally problematic practice, surprisingly common in critical theory, of seeking solace and rescue in religious promises of transcendence. By contrast, Adorno’s reconfiguration of eschatology self-consciously imbibes both the theological inheritance of critical theory, and its contradictory secularisation. Adorno’s repetition of ‘After Auschwitz’ implores us to practice caution, and vigilant self-awareness, when illicitly invoking the aura of theology to secure our theoretical explanations and ethical commitments; but it also warns against the abandonment of the transcendental, in that the immanence of positivist and capitalist conceptuality is, for Adorno, profoundly complicit in the same atrocities that make theodicy obscene.

At the same time as advising caution, the theoretical consequences of Adorno’s disfigured eschatology re-forge the connection between critical theory and urgent, concrete international political action; a connection that has become dimmed or obfuscated in the recent twists and turns of post-positivist and post-Marxist IR theory. In Adorno’s ‘new categorical imperative’ there is a visible reflection of the United Nations’ foundational maxim: Never Again. But instead of the dim light of Security Council chambers, Adorno’s version of this phrase is illuminated by the glare of eschatology: the kind of political action required to make good on this promise is not that of Resolutions and peacekeeping, monitoring and power-brokering, but of radical philosophical and social change. Understood as part of the eschatological tradition that runs through historical materialism, Adorno is unmistakably opposed to political quietism or ethical liberalism: the new categorical imperative that is the ethical culmination of Adorno’s reworking of the messianic tradition in European critical thought, requires nothing short of revolution.