The Twitching of the Hand

Abstract

Adorno observes in Negative Dialectics: ‘For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner’s adage forbids: to work one’s way through the darkness without a lamp.’¹ The overpowering bleakness of the social, political and cultural context he analyses makes it difficult, almost impossible, he observes, to find an escape from the status quo, to find the freedom to act or even to think in a world that he characterizes as a ‘strait-jacket’,² and in a culture in which ‘there is not even the possibility of something outside it becoming visible, something that is not caught up in the general inclusiveness’.³