Adorno's Constellations (5)

This is my last post specifically about Constellations. In the four last posts, I tried, and hopefully succeeded, to make that concept clear. Of course, although I really like the concept, that presentation wouldn't be complete without a bit of criticism. So let me expose here 4 shortcomings of Constellations and finally explain why I think this concept remains central in contemporary philosophy.

©Tammy Bennert : A 300-year-old supernova remnant created by the explosion of a massive star.

Adorno, even if he tried hard to not presuppose anything – especially what a singularity is –, ends up making one big presupposition : the singularity consists in the totality of the historical interactions marking it. This is a problem we already encountered with Hegel and Adorno's was not ready to let it go : that's one of the frankfurter's major objections to Hegel's theory.

The real issue with this assumption is that this definition implies, since History is always a forward movement, that we cannot exhaustively know the objet because part of it is in the future, in its becoming.

Let's go even further : we thus come to a form of incompleteness of both objects and concepts. Constellations can't fully grasp a concept or an object by the very nature of objects, specifically due to the fact that their history – their singularness – is never completed. In other words, it means that concepts are incomplete *because objects are themselves incomplete*.

We can now clearly perceive that the idea of constellation is not really coherent with Adorno's reluctance to define singularities and his claim about concepts being in essence limited (instead of admitting that concepts are limited because the object itself is incomplete).

This is my last post about Constellations, but not the last time you will hear about it here. Despite it all, I still believe that Constellations have a huge potential: Adorno's concept opens up a possibility to at least reveal part of the singularity which was unreachable before its existence, and this without relying on the false claim that a concept can exhaust an object. And this is already something deeply valuable.