The second layer: Heidegger's legacy — The attack from above
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What Adorno takes from Heidegger
The adoption of Heideggerian motifs is harder to recognize in Adorno, because Adorno understood himself as a resolute opponent of Heidegger. The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) is a sharp polemic against existential-ontological language; Negative Dialectics contains extensive engagements with Heidegger, in which Adorno criticizes his “Being” as an empty abstraction, his language as pseudo-concreteness, his politics as compromised. This critique is justified on many individual points.
But beneath the polemical surface lies a deeper commonality that Adorno’s polemic itself conceals. Heidegger’s basic philosophical diagnosis is: conceptual thinking misses Being, because it turns Being into beings — into determinable, classifiable, controllable objects. The essential does not show itself in conceptual grasp but in withdrawal. Being “essences” (west), it “clears itself” (lichtet sich), it “conceals itself” — it cannot be reduced to definitions. The method corresponding to this diagnosis is not conceptual determination but “letting” — the “releasement” (Gelassenheit) that lets Being be, instead of penetrating it dialectically.[1]
The legitimate intuition behind this diagnosis, as Volume I has shown, is insight into the irreducibility of facticity, finitude, and contingency. There is a “that” which precedes the “what”; mere existence cannot be fully dissolved into concepts. The systematic limit lies in the fact that Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics leaves a gap that is never filled. Talk of “Being” that “essences” and “withdraws” is metaphor, not conceptual determination. A philosophy that only intimates and evokes has abandoned its scientific function.[2]
Adorno takes over from Heidegger the basic structure of this diagnosis — and he takes it over more deeply than the polemical surface suggests. The “non-identical” is Adorno’s version of Heidegger’s “Being”: that which withdraws from the concept, what does not resolve in identifying thought, what remains as remainder, surplus, residue. The “constellation” — Adorno’s methodological alternative to defining thought — is Adorno’s version of Heidegger’s “releasement”: a thinking that does not grasp but circles, that does not subsume but illuminates, that does not identify but points out differences.
The difference lies in the evaluation, not in the structure. Heidegger affirms the withdrawal: Being shows itself precisely by concealing itself, and this concealment is not deficiency but richness. Adorno negates it: the non-identical is what suffers, what is suppressed, what should come into its own but cannot. Heidegger is — in the sharp formulation that goes back to Günter Rohrmoser — the positive ontologist; Adorno the negative one. But “positive” and “negative” here are only the signs in front of the same equation: in both cases, the essential is that which withdraws from the concept.[3]
What follows from this: The prohibition of conceptual closure
The consequence of the Heideggerian layer in Adorno’s thought is a general distrust of conceptual closure. Every act of definition — “X is Y” — is violence, because it makes the non-identical disappear, because it suppresses whatever in the thing does not enter the concept. Thought must not identify, must not subsume, must not close off. It must remain open, it must maintain difference, it must “rescue” the non-identical.
The methodological consequence is the “constellation”: instead of defining, one should group concepts around the thing, illuminate it from various perspectives, show its contradictions without resolving them. Thinking becomes circling, and circling becomes programmatic: it is the appropriate procedure not despite but because of its inconclusiveness.
Here too the gap that Volume I diagnosed in Heidegger reproduces itself. Negative Dialectics destroys identifying thought, but it cannot specify what should take its place. The “constellation” remains programmatic — a promise, not a fulfilled method. Adorno’s material analyses (culture industry, sociology of music) function precisely where they identify, subsume, determine — that is, precisely where they violate their own program.
The doubling: Nietzsche and Heidegger together
The real point does not lie in the two layers taken separately but in their combination. From Nietzsche, Adorno has learned: every positive determination is suspect, because it serves interests, conceals power, rationalizes domination. Therefore: no positive determinations. From Heidegger, Adorno has learned: every concept misses the thing, because it identifies where difference reigns, because it closes where openness would be needed. Therefore: no concepts that close things off.
Together, these two prohibitions yield the Adornian aporia: one may neither determine positively (because that is ideological) nor conclude conceptually (because that is violent). What remains is the negative gesture — pointing out what has been missed, without saying what would be right. This is “negative dialectics”: not a dialectic without anything positive, but a dialectic under a double prohibition — the synthesis of two bans on thinking that together turn thinking itself into a problem.
This doubling explains what is so peculiarly difficult about Adorno’s texts. They are not difficult because they express deep thoughts in difficult language — many a deep thought can be stated clearly. They are difficult because they follow two mutually reinforcing prohibitions: no positive judgment and no conceptual determination. What remains is a prose that constantly means something without being allowed to say it — that points to something it cannot name — that raises a claim to truth while programmatically refusing the means to redeem it. The combination of Heidegger’s pathos of Being (turned negative) and Nietzsche’s aphoristic gesture produces that peculiar Adornian prose which is at once darkly significant and repetitive in content: one has the impression of infinite depth, because the language constantly points beyond itself — to a “non-identical,” an “other,” a “more” — but when one asks what this “more” is, the only answer is always negative: not what is.
The doubling also explains why Adorno’s various concepts — “immanence,” “totality,” “identity,” “system,” “integration,” “context of delusion” — despite their different origins, bear a family resemblance that borders on interchangeability. All of them designate, each from a different direction, the same basic accusation: that reality, as it is, misses the essential. The concepts vary the perspective, but they circle around the same point, because the double blockade allows only this one point: the negation of what exists, without specifying an alternative.
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Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), on the basic diagnosis of the “forgetting of Being”; idem, Discourse on Thinking (Gelassenheit, 1959), on the methodological consequence of “letting be.” On the systematic analysis, see Martin Heidegger — The Destruction of Western Metaphysics. ↩︎
On the critique of Heidegger’s constructive gap, see Martin Heidegger — The Destruction of Western Metaphysics and Integration or Contradiction? — The Open Question. ↩︎
The formulation “positive” and “negative” ontologist goes back to Günter Rohrmoser. Rohrmoser sees the identity of both positions in their lack of relation to historical reality: “the reverent thinking that prepares for Being the site of a new presence” behaves toward reality “just as devoid of mediation and relation as the possibility of utopia in Adorno is toward what is.” See also Hartmut Scheible and Manfred Riedel, who independently confirmed this parallel. ↩︎