For surely particularly at his musically organized beginnings and endings ID: 254939
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It is enough to confront an older dialectic with some of these newer levels ordegrees of reality to appreciate the enlargement the dialectic is also called upon to make.From one direction, innumerable theories of virtuality reflect an increasinglyinformational cosmos and its technologies and at the very least confront a Hegeliantradition with the palpable need for new logical categories beyond those of the possible orthe probable. From another level of reality, the peculiar new originalities of an imagesociety pose problems not even LacanÕs notion of the Imaginary is capable of solving andtend at their outer limit to substitute themselves for a traditional reality they seem capableof doing altogether without. But how can the simulacrum be said to be negative, and inwhat way do the seemingly untheorizable temporalities of photography Ð where the pastis still present, even though long dead Ð offer any kind of handle to the dialectic?Indeed, as far as time is concerned, a peculiarly contemporary temporal paradoxseemed to confront the ÒteleologyÓ with which the dialectic was always taxed: namelythat Freudian NachtrŠglichkeit34 For surely, particularly at his musically organized beginnings and endings Ðonsets and final flourishes Ð Adornian thought tends to embrace the literary and linguisticÒsimple formÓ of the paradox. Thus Aesthetic Theory (a draft to be sure, publishedposthumously) beings like this: ÒIt is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any moreÓ52: a sentence which threatens to undermine the very project of writingan aesthetic before it even gets started. Or perhaps it simply designates philosophyÕsperpetual problem with beginnings: nothing can be presupposed, not even the idea ofpresupposition. We are left dangerously in a place in which it may not be possible to sayanything (whence AdornoÕs fascination with Beckett). James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy (NY, 1974).7 Friederich Engels, The Dialectics of Nature (London, 1940), chapter two.8 T.W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel (Frankfurt, 1997), p. 257.60 Slavoj _i_ek,61