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Migration into the Profane. According to Adorno, “nothing of theological
content will survive without transformation, every single item of this content
has to stand to the challenge of migrating into the secular, the profane.” (
Rea-
son and Revelation). This could serve as a motto for his own “profane” adoption
of theological or kabbalistic ideas. Metaphysical experience, exegesis of pro-
fane instead of sacred texts, or the concept of “divine name”, are attempts
to grasp “kabbalistic” ideas under secular conditions. This postulate of “pro-
fanicization” is not directed against Kabbalah but derived from it. Adorno
repeatedly claims that there was an inner tendency of mysticism that finally
turned into enlightenment. His
Gruß an Gershom G. Scholem (1967) describes
this at length: Only at the farthest distance from its origin, is it that mysticism’s
“historical truth” can be seized. Such formulations aim at a secular realization
of lost religious hopes, while at the same time they rely on Scholem’s research
about Sabbatianism and its “Antinomism”: ritual negation of the revealed law
as “Redemption Through Sin”. From Scholem’s zionist perspective, this was
an ambiguous process. According to him, Sabbatianism represented a rupture
with traditional order, and therefore, an opening towards modernity, but at the
same time, a threat for the verzunity of Judaism, paving the way for assimila-
tion. Consequently, Scholem rejected Adorno’s “Migration into the Profane”
because he believed in a fully covered, but nonetheless existing god. Despite
such differences between Scholem’s and Adorno’s acknowledgements of the
“mystical heresy” inherent in Sabbatianism, the latter was a repeated subject
of their discussions, and in the
Festschrift for Adorno’s 60
th
birthday, Scholem
wrote another essay addressing the topic. In it, we find the destructive poten-
tial described as a negative way of pointing to an obstructed better future. The
parallel to Adorno is obvious: The latter notes that, because any radical change
of the world is missing and does not seem possible any more, hope consists
in denouncing the existing totality as an “untrue” one. The opportunity of
transcendence “overwinters” hidden in profane critique.
Adorno and Scholem agree with each other in describing Kafka as an heir
of Kabbalah and especially of Sabbatianism: In Scholem’s eyes, he is a com-
mentator in an age in which revelation has fallen into silence, a theological
thinker in the abyss of nihilism. For Adorno, revelation is no longer relevant,
Kafka doesn’t rest on a silenced Torah but glimpses the bleak world as if he
perceived it from a better place and recognized it as hell. In several unpub-
lished letters to Hans Jonas, Hans Günther Adler, and Erich Heller, Adorno
described Kafka as a gnostic. Adorno’s remarks on this kind of “Gnosticism”
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do not long for a secret deity of light but instead, reveal it as the evil demiurge:
what is imagined as pure
and rational, turns out to be nothing
but the logic
of capitalist society. However, in Kafka’s figure of Odradek, Adorno sees a
negative signal of a self-overthrowing reification: Similar to Benjamin’s claim
that hope is only given “for the sake of the hopeless”, Adorno’s Odradek
stands for something that is useless even for the ubiquitous capitalist imper-
atives of utilization. This truly is a hopeless hope, and what is even darker is
Adorno’s remarks on Samuel Beckett or in
Negative Dialectics. After Auschwitz,
metaphysics is inexorably forced into the “stage of suffering”, the “somatic,
meaningless stratum of life” (
Negative Dialectics). This may be the last stage of
“Migration into profane”, no word is left for hope or consolation.