Adorno and Lukács: The riddle of History and class consciousness in Adorno's philosophy

Abstract

This article reconstructs Adorno's early concept of the philosophical riddle by situating it in a sustained, though ambivalent, engagement with Lukács' work. Adorno adopts Lukács' analysis of bourgeois antinomies and the commodity-form as the experiential core of modern philosophy, while decisively rejecting Lukács' ontological and totalizing resolutions. Against solutions grounded in the standpoint of totality, Adorno radicalizes the antinomic character of bourgeois thought by insisting on the liquidation of its fundamental questions. Through an immanent deciphering of philosophy itself, social-historical reality emerges within conceptual structures without being reduced to sociological or historicist explanations. The article shows that Adorno remains faithful to the critical impulse of Lukács' early work precisely by refusing its later ontological turn, thereby transforming the riddle of the commodity into a negative, non-ontological model of critique grounded in non-identity.