The Inheritance of the Constellation

This chapter devotes itself to the complex relation between Adorno and Hegel via the question of inheritance and the constellative form itself. To refine our understanding of Adorno’s critical gesture of the uncoercive gaze in relation to certain aspects of Hegelian thought, the chapter focuses in particular on Adorno’s understanding of Hegel’s masterful early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), a text without which Adorno’s practice of negative dialectics hardly would be graspable. By focusing on the question of an uneasily “inherited” intellectual tradition—an inheritance with which it is ultimately impossible fully to come to terms and that continues to remain something of an unhealed wound—Adorno’s uncoercive gaze here is exposed and enriched in terms of its genealogical and historical substrata. In works such as Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno not only grapples with the “with” when he thinks “with Hegel,” he also theorizes his own intellectual project in terms of a spectral inheritance, a legacy that is enigmatic and demands to be interpreted always one more time, rather than being taken for granted as a stable system of precepts, dialectical or otherwise.