In a rejoinder to the Hegelian notion that philosophy only has the task of painting the gray of the world in gray, Adorno once explained: ���Consciousness could not even despair over what is grey if we did not possess the concept of a different color, whose scattered trace is not absent in the negative whole.���

For Adorno, this learning process commits him to a secularizing gesture that can learn from theology even while it leaves no sacred concepts immune. He summarized this view in a remark in a radio discussion (later published as ���Revelation or Autonomous Reason���) from the late 1950s: ���Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating into the secular, the profane.���

Adorno was far too skeptical about the technological optimism that seems to be built into orthodox Marxism, and like many of his generation, he had also lost his confidence in the proletariat as the singular and unified collective agent of history. Nor did he accept the strong element of economism that lurks in some versions of historical materialism. He worried that economism reflects an ideology of unfreedom: Rather than restoring to humanity our self-conception as agents who have the capacity to shape our own destiny, it eternalizes the experience of ourselves as mere objects who are locked in a deterministic mechanism. Vulgar Marxism, you might say, is not a solution to our unfreedom; it is merely its symptom.

What he admires in an artwork is not its illusory transcendence but its capacity to transcribe in its very form the suffering and imperfection of the surrounding world. This is why he was especially drawn to the later works by Beethoven, in which the breaks and fissures seem to express the subject���s limitations and the promises of non-identity. 

Invoking a famous idea from Stendhal and Baudelaire, he said that all genuine art also serves as a ���promise of happiness.��� Incidentally, this is where I found the title of my book. Adorno once said of modern music that it contains as much ���precarious happiness��� as it does despair. To me, this line conveys his broader understanding of art as an unresolved dialectic.

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