Adorno’s negative theology

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century. His pivotal work is Negative Dialectic (1966). It presents the methodology of his critical thought and aesthetic analyses, the source of the categories, concepts, and theories through which his philosophical thinking operates and develops. I argue for that his methodology has its roots not only in Western metaphysical thought (Kantian, Hegelian) and an anti-metaphysical materialism (Marx), but that an equally important, but almost forgotten source is traditional Jewish thought: Luria’s cabbalah in G. Scholem’s interpretation, and its creative assimilation in the theories of W. Benjamin, E. Bloch or R. Rosenzweig. I therefore describe this vanishing context of Adorno’ s philosophy: Scholem’s thesis of cabbalistic revelation as an insignificant "pure language"; Benjamin’s theory of language as a phenomenon-constellation and presentation of ideas; Bloch’s concept of "traces" as a paradoxical presence of revelation; Rosenzweig’s theory of salvation and its immanent critique of Hegelian Reason as Totality. My goal is to show the specificity and creative continuation of above ideas in Negative Dialectic. I thus underline the importance of the relationship between Western thought and the Jewish tradition, renewed by Adorno’s work.