20

The essay examines three instances of affinity in Adorno’s writings, not in order to reconstruct a theory he never elaborated as such, but to identify a few points within a “constellation”: in the first of the Three Studies on Hegel, affinity designates an understanding of truth distinct from adequation; in “Parataxis,” it names a non-dominating relationship between subject and object, and in the context of aesthetic theory it becomes a key to the complex relationship between art and philosophy. Far from obliterating the distance between the terms it brings together, affinity expresses the survival of a common ground that is never synonymous with identity.