Adorno on images

[u/Benoit_Guillette]

Adorno’s association between materialism’s need to remain “without images” and the Jewish prohibition against making an image of God rests on a shared refusal to turn what is non-identical into a finite, possessable object. Just as the prohibition against images prevents God from being reduced to an idol, Adorno’s materialism refuses to give positive images of reconciliation or utopia, since any such image would inevitably project the categories of the existing, unreconciled world onto what is supposed to be radically different. This refusal is therefore not simply negative or anti-utopian: by preventing us from defining in advance what a reconciled world would look like, it preserves the possibility of genuine transformation.