The Unconscious of Critique: Adorno and Deleuze as Readers of Kant and Freud

Introduction

Few philosophers of the twentieth century have been so persistently cast in oppositional terms as Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze. In the reception of their work, the two are routinely constructed as mirror images: while Adorno's thought is associated with negativity (Freyenhagen 2013), dialectics (Jameson 2007), and melancholy science (Rose 1978), Deleuze's philosophy is linked to affirmation (Braidotti 2019), becoming (Grosz 2005), and gay science (Foucault 2000). ¹ While such characterizations are not without textual and conceptual support, this paper advances the claim that the often-stated opposition between Adorno and Deleuze obscures a fundamental concern they share: both Adorno and Deleuze, writing in the mid-twentieth century, take up the task of introducing the affective forces of the unconscious—first rendered accessible to systematic reflection by psychoanalysis, above all by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century—into the domain of philosophical thought. They share the conviction that only by engaging with an unconscious surplus exceeding the conscious, identical subject can philosophy itself become a kind of surplus—able to transcend merely identificatory (Adorno) or representational (Deleuze) thinking and move beyond the given status quo. Both thinkers thus seek to articulate a mode of critique informed by the unconscious. This proximity is evident even at the level of terminology: both describe this mode of thought as imageless [bilderlos (Adorno 2013, 205); sans image (Deleuze 2015, 217)], thereby highlighting its potential to move beyond the “images” of consciousness. ² Undeniably, profound differences separate Adorno’s and Deleuze’s philosophies. Yet viewed from this perspective, they appear not as opposites but as two distinct ways of exploring the unconscious as a resource for critique: Adorno seeks to critique society through the political interpretation of unconscious suffering, whereas Deleuze aims to critique and transform it through the aesthetic unfolding of unconscious desire.

The paper’s second central claim is that, in order to reconstruct and relate these conceptions of critique, it is necessary to move beyond Freud and attend to Adorno’s and Deleuze’s often underestimated engagements with Kant. For both thinkers, the confrontation with Kant provides the philosophical framework for their reception of psychoanalysis and for their attempt to ground and refine a form of critique informed by the unconscious. Their relation to Kant is marked by deep ambivalence, ³ particularly with respect to the Copernican turn. In Kant’s turn to the subject, both Adorno and Deleuze discern not only the origin of an idealistic philosophy of consciousness but also—more unexpectedly—the potential for its overcoming. On the one hand, Kant, they argue, reductively identified the subject with the unity of consciousness and thereby excluded all manifestations of the unconscious from thought. On the other hand, he executed this exclusion so rigorously that, within his detailed analyses of subjectivity, one can detect what Deleuze calls a “fracture” [fêlure] (Deleuze 2014, 113) and Adorno a “suture” [Naht] (Adorno 2001, 44). It is precisely at this point that Freud and psychoanalysis become decisive for both thinkers. Each thinker, in a heterodox manner, appropriates Freud in order to elaborate these Kantian potentials and thereby to allow the forces of the unconscious to enter philosophical thought. For both Adorno and Deleuze, their readings of Freud are thus bound up with the project of, as Christian Kerslake puts it in reference to Deleuze, “completing” (Kerslake 2004, 481) Kant’s Copernican turn. Adorno calls this undertaking a “second Copernican turn” (Adorno 1998a, 249) while Deleuze speaks of “a more considerable revolution than the Copernican” (Deleuze 2014, 237).

Focusing on Adorno’s and Deleuze’s engagements with Kant proves illuminating not only because it clarifies the shared point at which psychoanalysis enters their philosophies, but also because it brings into view the divergent functions it ultimately fulfills within them. Their respective conceptions of a critique informed by the unconscious diverge in how they resolve the ambivalence of the Kantian turn. Adorno takes his point of departure from reason’s unconditional questions, above all from the problem of the thing-in-itself. While Kant, in Adorno’s view, sought to delimit reason’s self-reflexive power, Adorno seeks to strengthen it, transforming it into a thinking of nonidentity. It is precisely here that psychoanalysis assumes its place within Adorno’s work: to grasp the logic of nonidentical cognition, Adorno draws on Freud’s theory of the symptom, which he then politicizes by interpreting unconscious suffering as a symptom of social contradiction. Deleuze, by contrast, identifies the faculty of sensibility, as described in the aesthetics of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, as the point of rupture within the identity of consciousness. This marks the philosophical site at which psychoanalysis and the unconscious enter his work: By developing an aesthetic reading of the death drive, Deleuze explicates—both with and against Freud—the latent potential of Kant’s notion of sensibility, conceptualizing a mode of critique that unfolds the productive power of desire as a source of new forms of social praxis.

This paper aims to bring Adorno’s and Deleuze’s respective approaches into dialogue concerning the role of the unconscious in critique by presenting their philosophies as two distinct ways of completing Kant’s Copernican turn. ⁴ To this end, I will (1) reconstruct Adorno’s and Deleuze’s shared diagnosis of the ambivalence of Kant’s Copernican turn; (2) trace Adorno’s attempt to move beyond Kantian consciousness-identity at the point of rupture within unconditional reason, thereby appropriating and reinterpreting Freud’s theory of the symptom; and (3) examine Deleuze’s corresponding attempt to do so at the point of rupture within aesthetic experience, drawing on and reworking Freud’s theory of unconscious desire. In a subsequent step, (4) I will bring their approaches into dialogue by confronting Adorno’s “second” with Deleuze’s “more considerable” Copernican turn, thereby clarifying how each relates to the unconscious and what accounts for their divergence. Finally, (5) I will contextualize their respective conceptions of critique—Adorno’s against the backdrop of his analyses of fascism and the culture industry, and Deleuze’s in light of his anticipation of May ’68—and ask what significance the unconscious might hold for social criticism today.

The Ambivalence of Kant’s Copernican Turn

Hegel, Husserl, and Marx are usually foregrounded in the philosophical reception of Adorno (cf. Pickford and Shuster 2023), while Nietzsche, Bergson, and Spinoza—what Todd May calls Deleuze’s “holy trinity” (May 2005, 26)—occupy a comparable position in the reception of Deleuze. By contrast, their respective readings of Kant have remained largely overlooked ⁵ , as have the striking ways in which these readings converge. With regard to Kant’s Copernican turn, both thinkers articulate not only a shared ambivalence, but also ground this ambivalence in the same intuition: Kant’s turn constitutes an inconsequential and ultimately timid attempt at secularization. To understand this critique, one must first recall the promise of the Copernican turn itself. Kant’s philosophy fundamentally aims to enable human beings to orient themselves in the world autonomously, free from external guardians and dogmatic constraints. To achieve this, Kant executes a radical turn toward the subject: he submits the subjective faculties to a rigorous critique, reconstructing them within their inherent capacities and structural limits so that their deployment can be relied upon. For Adorno and Deleuze, however, this project remains profoundly fraught. In reflecting on the subject, Kant indeed asks how human beings can orient themselves in the world autonomously. In doing so, he also emancipates the subject from divine order, though—tragically—not from the idea of a necessary order itself. What Kant shares with his dogmatic predecessors, Adorno and Deleuze argue, albeit in different vocabularies, is the underlying assumption that the world of experience possesses a unified and immutable structure. Rather than abandoning what Adorno calls the “principle of identity” (Adorno 2004, 237) and what Deleuze describes as the representative “image of thought” (Deleuze 2014, 171) after the fall of dogmatic orders, both authors develop the idea that Kant merely transforms them (cf. Adorno 2004, 195; Deleuze 2014, 73–74, 113).

More precisely, Kant can be said, on both readings, to subjectivize the formerly theologically guaranteed order. In this regard, Deleuze distinguishes between an “identity of divine substance” (Deleuze 2014, 73) and an “identity of the I,” (ibid., 113) arguing that Kant replaces the former with the latter. Whereas the identity of order was once guaranteed by the concept of substance or God, it is now produced by the synthesizing and ordering activity of the I. Adorno develops a similar argument. He claims that Kant internalizes the lost divine order within the subject as a methodological principle, so that, through the subject’s own structuring activity, this order is resurrected as an order of facts. Once the identity and order of objects are no longer guaranteed from without, the subject itself must secure them. Thus, Adorno characterizes “the construction of transcendental subjectivity” in Negative Dialectics as “a magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its opposite pole” (Adorno 2004, 185–186)—the subject. In this sense, Adorno and Deleuze interpret the principles of knowledge developed in the Critique of Pure Reason as establishing a framework that obliges the subject to conceive the external world as stable and law-bound, even though its order is no longer secured by divine authority (cf. Adorno 2004, 195; Deleuze 2014, 73–74, 113).

On closer inspection, Adorno and Deleuze discern—again, though employing different concepts, yet in similar ways—two moments within Kant’s Copernican turn: a genuinely revolutionary one, which Kant, in a second restorative moment—“the betrayal” (Lord 2012, 84)—then retracts. On the one hand, Kant, in contrast to rationalism (especially Descartes), expands the notion of cognition toward sensuous experience. He recognizes that cognition involves not only the faculty of understanding but also that of sensibility. Unlike the rationalist subject of cognition, defined solely through conceptual thought, the Kantian subject is thus characterized by a certain dualism between spontaneous thinking and receptive sensation, between the active faculty of understanding and the passive faculty of sensibility, between transcendental determination and empirical, temporal determinability. Deleuze describes this as a “fracture” (Deleuze 2014, 113) within the subject: “It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other” (ibid.). ⁶ Similarly, Adorno refers to a “suture” [Naht] within the subject, through which Kant “has already conceded entry to sensory material against his will” (Adorno 2001, 44). This concession is so far-reaching that it internally contradicts his conception of the unity of consciousness. Thus, Adorno writes, a suture runs through the subject, “a suture that constantly threatens to come apart” (ibid.).

On the other hand, Adorno and Deleuze both express, each in his own way, the idea that Kant, due to his inability to free himself entirely from dogmatic metaphysics, did not go far enough in opening thought toward sensuous experience. Although, for Kant, the experience that guides knowledge consists of both intuition and concept, all unconscious sensations are excluded from knowledge. For, as both Deleuze and Adorno insist, the subject to whom the world appears as a unified order even after the collapse of dogmatic metaphysics is a very specific kind of subject—one that itself constitutes a unity. Only a unified subject can, of its own accord, construct unified orders. By contrast, a subject that gives itself over too fully to the unconscious dimensions of experience fails to produce a clear, unified, and stable image of the external world, since these dimensions obscure any claim to univocity and introduce internal tensions into experience itself. “God is retained so long as the Self is preserved” (Deleuze 2014, 73), remarks Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. “Finite synthetic Self or divine analytic substance: it amounts to the same thing” (ibid.). Adorno describes a similar relation in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “We might say, therefore, that [when] Kant proceeds […] from the given fact of identical things as opposed to the manifold nature of appearances, […] he is forced into the assumption of a unified consciousness, just as, conversely, the mechanism of the unity of consciousness brings forth something like the unity of the thing” (Adorno 2001, 107).

If one follows these lines of thought further, one could say that Kant retreats from the internal division of the subject he himself uncovers—namely, the insight that both sensibility and understanding participate in knowledge—when he defines transcendental consciousness as a “pure, original, unchanging” (Kant 1998, 232) unity of the subject that “precedes” (ibid.) the duality of sensibility and understanding. Kant’s transformation of dogmatic metaphysics into epistemology compels him to postulate this unity of a pure, original, and unchanging consciousness—a move that, as a direct consequence, delegitimizes the unconscious dimension of sensibility within cognition. While Kant does not deny the existence of unconscious sensibility, he regards it merely as a “blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream” (ibid., 237)—a state of consciousness that exists de facto but fails to acknowledge the de jure preceding unity of consciousness. The task of cognition therefore becomes to realize this latent unity empirically—which in practice means excluding those unconscious aspects of sensibility that cannot be integrated into the postulated unity. Thus, Kant sacrifices the unconscious part of sensibility because he cannot completely abandon dogmatic metaphysics.

To what extent, then, do Adorno and Deleuze nonetheless see the potential in Kant’s philosophy to inspire a break with traditional metaphysics and to invent a form of imageless thought? Both are guided by the intuition that Kant was more acutely aware of the fragility of his construction of the subject as a synthesizing unity of consciousness—the fracture (Deleuze) or suture (Adorno) within the subject—than those who built upon his foundations and went on to consolidate the notion of such synthetic unity. Although Kant’s reflections ultimately restrict the knowing subject to its conscious dimensions, traces of bodily, preconscious, and unconscious experience remain more evident in his intricate account of the relation between sensibility and understanding than in that of many of his successors—if only because he remained alert to their destabilizing implications for the ordering power of consciousness. ⁷ Adorno speaks of a “historical threshold” (Adorno 2001, 121) between an already overcome subjection to religious dogma and an impending positivist subjection to facts—a threshold on which Kant’s philosophy stands and from which its unique potential arises. Deleuze captures Kant’s exceptional historical position in similar terms: “Rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing), we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism” (Deleuze 2014, 73). Adorno and Deleuze thus converge, at least initially, on a similar path: a return to Kant’s Copernican turn in order to expose the latent fissure within the subject, thereby extending thought—previously confined to consciousness—into an imageless mode that derives a transformative force from engaging with the unconscious. What emerges here is the shared horizon of a critique informed by the unconscious.

Adorno: The Emancipation of Reason and the Politicization of Symptom Theory

The primary advantage of the perspective developed in this paper lies in its ability to illuminate not only Adorno’s and Deleuze’s shared ambition—to ground a mode of critique informed by the unconscious as articulated through their respective notions of imageless thought—but also the radical divergence in their execution of this project. For although both attempt to disclose what appears in Kant, respectively, as a “fracture” (Deleuze) or a “suture” (Adorno) within the subject, they proceed in fundamentally different ways. Adorno and Deleuze agree that, in his account of the subject, Kant curtailed one faculty in particular in order to secure the synthetic unity of consciousness and to expel unconscious sensibility from thought. Their shared task, therefore, is to redescribe this weakened faculty and to actualize its latent potential, thereby exposing the fissure within the identity of consciousness and opening the possibility of a critique informed by the unconscious. Yet while their approaches initially converge, they diverge as soon as the question becomes where, within the subject, the critical potential for such a rupture is to be located as each locates the bearer of this potential in a different faculty. Adorno seeks to open the unity of consciousness through the self-reflexive power of reason, which makes room within consciousness for unconscious sensibility: “The force of consciousness extends to the delusion of consciousness” (Adorno 2004, 148). Deleuze, by contrast, turns directly to sensibility itself, whose productive forces, once liberated, press immediately into consciousness. Adorno and Deleuze thus pursue two fundamentally different strategies for rupturing the synthetic unity of consciousness: Adorno opens it from “above,” through the self-reflexive withdrawal of reason that creates space for unconscious expression; Deleuze opens it from “below,” through the release of sensuous forces that carve out their own space within thought.

Adorno thus regards Kant’s philosophy as restricting the self-reflexive power of reason and seeks to reclaim this power against Kant himself. He specifically criticizes Kant for allowing reason to operate only insofar as it serves “to introduce a kind of order into the world,” while the moment “it goes beyond that, as soon as it touches the true ground of existence, it finds itself accused of sacrilege and unwarranted curiosity” (Adorno 2001, 72). At the center of this critique lies Kant’s conception of the thing-in-itself, in which Adorno finds Kant’s ambivalence toward the unconditional claims of reason most strikingly exemplified. Kant insists that we cannot dispense with the idea of the thing as it is in itself, even though our knowledge remains confined to appearances and the things that exist beyond them are necessarily inaccessible. For the concept of appearance to have any meaning within epistemology, and not remain entirely empty, we must assume that appearances are appearances of things that exist independently of our forms of experience: “For otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears” (Kant 1998, 115).

On the one hand, Adorno sees in Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself a fundamental insight—namely, that, as Anke Thyen observes, Kant recognizes that things are not exhausted by being known (cf. Thyen 1989, 153). Adorno adopts this insight and makes it a central pillar of his own theory. Without such an “idea of otherness” (Adorno 2004, 184), Adorno argues, following Kant, knowledge necessarily collapses into tautology. Although the subject can only access objects in a mediated way, it must conceive the idea of otherness—that the mediated is not absorbed within mediation itself—in order for knowledge to have any meaning at all. ⁸

“Kant still refused to be talked out of the moment of objective preponderance. […] To him it was evident that being-in-itself did not run directly counter to the concept of an object, that the subjective indirectness of that concept is to be laid less to the object’s idea than to the subject’s insufficiency. The object cannot get beyond itself for Kant either, but he does not sacrifice the idea of otherness. Without otherness, cognition would deteriorate into tautology; what is known would be knowledge itself.” (ibid.)

On the other hand, Adorno criticizes Kant for ultimately neutralizing the idea of otherness. For Kant, the thing-in-itself serves merely as a “reminder that subjective knowledge is not the whole story” (Adorno 2004, 128), yet this insight remains “without further consequence” (ibid.). By interpreting the thing-in-itself as the “cause of the appearances” (Kant 2004, 98), Kant, Adorno argues, flattens the demands of reason. Rather than pursuing questions about the nature of things beyond our forms of experience, these questions are deflected: since things in themselves already act upon us “because they affect our senses” (ibid., 40), any further inquiry is deemed unnecessary.

Adorno rejects this interpretation of the thing-in-itself in order to realize the full potential of the idea of otherness implicit within it. He argues that this idea can be honored only if the object is granted a “preponderance” in every act of thought (cf. Adorno 2004, 183–186; Jarvis 1998, 181–184; O’Connor 2004, 65–66). When followed through consistently, the idea of otherness demands an attitude that forbids the imposition of subjective forms and concepts upon the object without at the same time allowing the object the possibility of transforming those forms and concepts in return. Precisely because the object does not dissolve into the subject, cognition cannot remain at the level of unreflective recognition or identification—of merely reducing the object to what is already subjectively known. The subject must instead remain open to the possibility that the object will show prior knowledge of it to be inadequate. Only such openness, Adorno insists, truly grants the object its preponderance.

“The primacy of the object can be discussed legitimately only when that primacy—over the subject in the broadest sense of the term—is somehow determinable, that is, more than the Kantian thing-in-itself as the unknown cause of phenomenal appearance. […] The primacy of the object proves itself in that it qualitatively alters the opinions of reified consciousness that are smoothly consistent with subjectivism.” (Adorno 1998a, 250–251)

But how can this preponderance—or primacy—of the object be realized in thought? Here, the unconscious surplus plays a decisive role, above all in the form of unrecognized, unconscious suffering. Adorno holds that suffering signals to the subject—bodily—that their reflection on the object is mistaken. ⁹ The mind tends toward identification and seeks to recognize in the world what it already knows. The body—the object within the subject—however, communicates through suffering that the thought is mistaken. According to Adorno, it is precisely in these bodily impulses, which appear most subjective, that the object can make itself known; in this sense, they are in fact the most objective. “In places where subjective reason senses subjective contingency, the primacy of the object is shimmering through: that in the object which is not a subjective addition” (ibid., 506). To grant the object primacy in thought, Adorno maintains, is to take seriously this unconscious surplus of suffering as a signal or expression of the object, rather than—following Kant—excluding it from cognition. It means not simply identifying the object but thinking it imagelessly—without conscious preconceptions or guiding images—and asking what in one’s own thinking is mistaken, and how one might do justice to the object in thought, or at least approach it more faithfully. The nonidentity of the subject—its unconscious suffering—is meant to shed light on the nonidentity of the object, on that which is not yet known. ¹⁰ The importance Adorno attaches to this idea is evident in Negative Dialectics, where he defines “the need to lend a voice to suffering” as “the condition of all truth” (Adorno 2004, 17). ¹¹

At this central point, Adorno draws on Freud and his theory of the symptom. Only against this background is it possible for Adorno to conceptualize his idea of imageless thinking of nonidentity. For it was Freud who discovered that unconscious suffering is by no means meaningless. Unlike clinical psychiatry, which merely catalogued such suffering, psychoanalysis “established in the first place the fact that symptoms have a sense and are related to the patient’s experiences” (Freud 1963, 257). However, this meaning is not immediately apparent; it must—according to Freud—be brought into speech. The task of psychoanalysis, therefore, is to decode symptoms by “interpretation” (ibid., 279) and to uncover the deeper conflicts that give rise to them—a concept that Adorno directly adopts and which is echoed in his call to lend a voice to suffering. ¹²

Adorno takes this psychoanalytic principle—the necessity of interpreting unconscious suffering—and politicizes it. Whereas Freud directs interpretation toward the healing of the individual—the symptom should disappear once unconscious drive conflicts are made conscious and drives incompatible with social expectations are either relinquished or sublimated—Adorno’s concern is not to resolve suffering on an individual level but to articulate it as social critique. For him, the symptom is not merely an individual defect but an epistemic signal: it indicates where subject and object are unreconciled, where the social order fails. For this reason, Adorno describes suffering as “objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed” (Adorno 2004, 17–18). ¹³

Adorno thus criticizes Freud for resolving conflicts between individual drives and society on the side of the individual, instead of politicizing them and understanding them as indicators of the need to criticize and transform the social order. Psychoanalysis, he argues, thereby degenerates into conformist “psycho-technics” (Adorno 2005, 63). According to Adorno, this can be observed directly in those who have undergone “successful” therapy: “the subsequent absence of conflicts reflects a predetermined outcome, the a priori triumph of collective authority, not a cure effected by knowledge.” (Adorno 2005, 59) Unlike Freud, who calls for sublimation of drives so that the subject’s libidinal life adapts to social reality, Adorno speaks of a “sublimation of rage”: “Whoever thinks is not enraged in all his critique: thinking has sublimated the rage” (Adorno 1998b, 293). Suffering should not be silenced (sublimation of drives), but rather allowed to be expressed and translated into criticism (sublimation of anger). In doing so, it loses its immediate aggressive sting but remains audible as an indictment of the false whole.

Adorno’s concept of imageless thought, which builds upon Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself and combines it with a transformed version of Freud’s theory of the symptom, constitutes a form of epistemology in which the very idea of knowledge is fundamentally political. For Adorno, to know an object is to recognize that we live within unreconciled object relations and, at the same time, to critique the society that perpetuates this lack of reconciliation. In its negative mode, as critique, imageless thinking strives toward both the utopia of reconciled object relations and that of a liberated society. Hence Adorno declares: “To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia” (Adorno 2004, 56). Imageless thought thus becomes a practice that transcends familiar preconceptions and guiding images, takes suffering as the object’s mode of expression seriously, and transforms it into a critique of the social conditions that give rise to that suffering.

Deleuze: The Liberation of Sensibility and the Aesthetic Unfolding of Desire

Deleuze pursues a different path toward completing the Copernican turn in imageless thought and thereby articulating a mode of critique informed by the unconscious. Unlike Adorno, he does not fault Kant for limiting the unconditional power of reason in order to preserve the unity of consciousness and, with it, the principle of identity. Instead, he turns his attention to another faculty: sensibility. Deleuze argues that in the aesthetic experiences of the first half of the Critique of Judgment, Kant recognizes that sensibility possesses a delimiting power; yet, Kant fails to draw the decisive implications, ultimately relativizing this potential. It is precisely at this juncture that Deleuze intervenes. Through his engagement with Freud’s metapsychology, he develops an imageless mode of thought that, rather than constraining the productive force of sensibility, allows it to unfold into a mode of critique informed by the unconscious. How, then, does Deleuze proceed?

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the subject’s sensibility as the capacity to “receive” (Kant 1998, 193) sensations from objects and to order them according to the pure forms of intuition—space and time. According to Deleuze, this definition is later challenged in the Critique of Judgment, when Kant turns to the analysis of aesthetic experience. In experiences of the beautiful or the sublime, a further dimension of sensibility comes to light: we not only receive sensations from objects but also feel pleasure and pain in the course of experiencing them. Yet instead of redefining sensibility in light of this insight, Deleuze argues that Kant categorically separates sensation, on the one hand, from pleasure and pain, on the other. While sensations convey information about the object under consideration, Kant maintains, pleasure and pain pertain solely to the subject—its affective response to the object. Feelings such as pleasure and pain are thus related reflexively to objective sensations, but are not themselves objective sensations. In doing so, Kant deprives these feelings of the status of objective sensations, classifying them instead as purely subjective, “which cannot become an element of cognition at all” (Kant 2000, 75). From Deleuze’s perspective, the decisive point in Kant’s conception is that, through this separation, the notion of sensibility from the Critique of Pure Reason—as mere receptivity—remains intact: for cognition, only the capacity to receive sensations is relevant:

“Kant defines the passive self in terms of simple receptivity, thereby assuming sensations already formed, then merely relating these to the a priori forms of their representation which are determined as space and time. In this manner, not only does he unify the passive self by ruling out the possibility of composing space step by step, not only does he deprive this passive self of all power of synthesis (synthesis being reserved for activity), but moreover he cuts the Aesthetic into two parts: the objective element of sensation guaranteed by space and the subjective element which is incarnate in pleasure and pain.” (Deleuze 2014, 126)

It is precisely this separation between objective sensation and subjective pleasure and pain that Deleuze seeks to overturn. Rather than treating aesthetic experience as a merely subjective–reflexive manifestation set apart from ordinary cognition, he understands it as revealing something operative in all experience, though ordinarily concealed: that experience is always permeated by our drives—and thus by pleasure and pain. In this respect, Deleuze argues, Kant’s conception of sensibility ultimately falters. From aesthetic experience, Deleuze infers that we do not merely receive sensations through our senses; rather, our senses co-create them in a preconscious, reciprocal exchange with the external world, structured by drives, pleasure, and pain. Our sensory organs never perceive the world neutrally or disinterestedly, he claims, but always within the horizon of our needs—that is, in relation to the potential satisfaction of drives. In place of receptivity as the defining feature of sensibility, Deleuze introduces the concept of “passive synthesis,” which mediates logically between passive reception and active production, seeking to capture this co-creative process (cf. De Bolle 2010, 135–136). ¹⁴

“[W]e have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation-contraction). The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world of representation.” (Deleuze 2014, 113)

Because Kant, in his account of experience, begins from the wrong starting point—namely, from pre-given sensations rather than from the reciprocal, preconscious exchange between our senses and the environment—he is, according to Deleuze, unable to pose the crucial question: how do we bring our drives into the process of experience formation? Deleuze argues that such participation can occur in two ways: either in a repressed form, as demanded by representational thinking, or in a mode that allows an excess of drive energy to become perceptible—an excess that imageless thought can take up and unfold. Kant rarely entertains this latter possibility, except in occasional allusions within his descriptions of the sublime (cf. ibid., 191). It is precisely at this point that Deleuze turns to Freud: only within Freud’s metapsychological framework can he articulate how drives, experience, and imageless thought are intertwined, and how a critique informed by the unconscious is possible.

Deleuze conceives of experience as unfolding through three syntheses (cf. Deleuze 2014, 121–122; Faulkner 2006; De Bolle 2010), the first two of which constitute the basis of representational thought, while the third transcends it toward imageless thought. ¹⁵ In presenting the first two syntheses, Deleuze draws on Freud’s distinction between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, as formulated in Freud’s 1911 essay Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. Both syntheses serve the satisfaction of drives, yet they operate on different levels and fulfill distinct functions. The first synthesis is the already mentioned passive synthesis. At this level, the sense organs attend to their environment and register recurring patterns. When such a repetition is perceived, the stimuli are contracted into a sensation. Deleuze describes this process as the production of a “living present” (Deleuze 2014, 94). According to Deleuze, this first synthesis already participates in the dynamics of drive satisfaction: through the repetition of perceptual habits, the organism begins to form initial orientations toward possible modes of gratification. As in Freud’s pleasure principle, the process is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure: the sense organs are under tension, and each successful repetition of a perceptual pattern releases this tension, producing a (hallucinatory) sense of satisfaction (cf. ibid., 98–99, Freud 2018, 3–14). The second synthesis continues this process in an active manner. Certain elements from the continuous flow of sensations are selected and composed into objects that enable the actual satisfaction of drives. This selection is carried out by memory, which examines and organizes preconscious sensations with reference to past, successful, and socially permitted actions—in analogy to Freud’s notion of “reality-testing” (Freud 2018, 10). Deleuze refers to this level as the “synthesis of pure past” (Deleuze 2014, 107) and characterizes it as an active synthesis. Here, stable and recognizable objects are constituted, allowing thought to relate to them instrumentally. With this stabilization, representational thinking emerges—hence Deleuze’s description of the active synthesis of memory as the “principle of representation” (ibid., 106).

Deleuze’s central concern is to move from the second synthesis to a third, in which representational thinking is transcended and imageless thinking becomes possible. Yet, according to Deleuze, this third synthesis can only arise if we radically revise our understanding of the drive, recognizing its capacity to extend beyond the mere pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction. Once again, Deleuze refers to Freud. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle—which Deleuze interprets as the “turning point of Freudianism” (ibid., 19)—Freud formulated the fundamental insight that the pleasure principle is only a secondary principle, while the death drive is primary and originary. This implies that drives do not primarily aim at pleasure, but at something else—namely, death. Freud therefore interprets the repetitions of pleasure merely as detours along the path toward death, concluding that “the goal of all life is death” (Freud 2011, 77).

Deleuze adopts this insight but reinterprets it. For him, death is not to be understood as a return to the inorganic or material, but as a destructive–creative potential. The drive does not seek a regression into stasis; it seeks to create new masks, new forms, new institutions of satisfaction. “Death has nothing to do with a material model. On the contrary, the death instinct may be understood in relation to masks and costumes” (ibid., 20). According to Deleuze, the death drive thus reveals the genuine potential inherent in every drive: not merely to attain conventional satisfaction through the recognition of preformed object-representations, but to transcend this function and invent ever-new modes of satisfaction by destroying, transforming, and displacing these representations. ¹⁶

From this follows Deleuze’s second major point of departure from Freud: the relation between repetition and repression must, in his view, be inverted. We do not repeat, as Freud’s notion of the compulsion to repeat suggests, because we repress—or have repressed. Rather, we repress—in the sense of disguising or displacing existing object-representations—because we passionately repeat (cf. ibid., 21). From this Deleuze draws far-reaching consequences. For him, desire (and the unconscious as a whole) is not, as Freud maintains, the outcome of inner conflicts or repressed drives, but a genuinely productive force: the destructive–creative power of differential repetition. Desire “appears neither as a power of negation nor as an element of an opposition, but rather as a questioning, problematizing and searching force which operates in a different domain than that of desire and satisfaction” (ibid., 136–37). It is precisely this force, according to Deleuze, that must find expression in the third synthesis through imageless thought. Only this synthesis enables a “complete liberation of desire” (De Bolle 2010, 147). Because it opens the field of new possibilities, Deleuze associates the third synthesis not with the present or the past, but with the future (cf. Deleuze 2014, 147).

What, then, characterizes the imageless thought of this third synthesis? For Deleuze, it is crucial that it not be confined to cognition—the mode of thinking proper to the second synthesis, which fails to do justice to the productive nature of the unconscious. Instead, thought must abandon the pursuit of knowledge altogether and reinvent itself as aesthetic thinking. This transformation, according to Deleuze, is inseparable from a fundamental reassessment of identity, grounded in the insight that “identity not be first, that it exist not as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different”—and he continues: “such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical” (ibid., 52). Every conception of an object, Deleuze argues, arises from the differential movements of desire and therefore remains open to further transformation. Only by acknowledging this openness can thought affirm the differential dynamics of the drive. The moment “that the ego takes upon itself the disguises and displacements” (ibid., 145), Deleuze writes, the thinking proper to the third synthesis comes to the fore. This mode of thought does not reproduce pre-existing object-representations but takes up the differential repetitions of desire in order to generate—without pre-given models or images—new forms and representations. Rather than contemplative theoria, thinking becomes a “theater of production” (Toscano 2006, 16). Deleuze condenses this into the striking formula of the genitality of thought, with which he defines imageless thinking: “The thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought without image” (Deleuze 2014, 217). ¹⁷

Imageless thought thus transforms the very function of thinking. It ceases to be a Kantian “tribunal” that judges the world according to pre-established categories; instead, it is redefined by its capacity to transform the existing status quo and thus becomes social critique. By liberating the unconscious from the “theater” of representation and treating it as a “factory” of desire, thought is empowered to disrupt the rigid structures of psychic and social life. Consequently, the third synthesis does not merely generate new concepts but catalyzes a new social praxis. Critique, in this sense, is the vital movement through which the subject affirms the differential forces of desire, turning the act of thinking into an active expression of life—one whose ultimate measure is its power to effect change: “Critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence” (Deleuze 2006, 3).

Completing the Copernican Turn: Adorno, Deleuze, and the Significance of the Unconscious for Critique

Another decisive consequence of reading Adorno’s and Deleuze’s philosophies as completions of Kant’s Copernican turn is that their respective theories of imageless thought can thereby be brought into dialogue concerning the role of the unconscious for critique. Unlike Kant, they both conceive of the unconscious not as an irrational residue to be excluded from thought but rather as a productive resource to which thought must turn. However, their notions of a “second” and a “more considerable” Copernican turn reveal how and why their scope diverges.

Adorno’s reconstructed path leads him to what he calls a “second Copernican turn” (Adorno 1998a, 249), which—as he explains in the preface to Negative Dialectics—takes the form of an “axial turn” (Adorno 2004, xx). The axis, I suggest, can be understood as the relation between sensibility and thought. While Adorno follows Kant in assuming that sensibility and thought constitute the two poles or sources of knowledge, he departs from him by redefining their relation—by rotating the axis that connects them. Against Kant’s primacy of conceptual thought, Adorno posits a precarious equilibrium between sensibility and thinking. Whereas in Kant, understanding dominates sensibility and suppresses its unconscious dimensions in order to preserve the unity of consciousness, Adorno’s conception of the subject allows for the expression of the unconscious and assigns cognition the task of continually translating manifestations of suffering back into consciousness and interpreting them—through political analysis—as symptoms of social pathologies. In this way, cognition becomes social critique. For this to occur, however, neither pole may dominate: if conceptual reason prevails, the unconscious surplus of suffering cannot find expression; if sensibility dominates, suffering remains unintelligible.

What, then, characterizes Deleuze’s Copernican turn? Like Adorno, he locates the central problem of Kant’s Copernican revolution in the relation between sensibility and thought. Yet whereas Adorno proposes a gradual reorientation—a precarious balance between the two—Deleuze calls for a complete inversion of Kant’s conceptual primacy. He envisions a form of thinking that surrenders itself unreservedly to unconscious sensibility, thereby turning into a form of critique that receives its transformative power from engaging with the unconscious. Critique, on this view, does not primarily translate unconscious excess back into consciousness; it follows the movements set in motion by the unconscious and pushes them forward. As Deleuze puts it: “Contrary to what is stated by the banal propositions of consciousness, thought thinks only on the basis of an unconscious, and thinks that unconscious in the transcendent exercise” (Deleuze 2014, 261). Only after such an inversion, Deleuze argues, can the true—productive—nature of the unconscious reveal itself. Every epistemological, interpretive, or hermeneutic mode of access, by contrast, neglects the genuine role of thought in the genesis of experience—to serve as the executing instance of the productive unconscious—and instead functions as a force of repression.

From Deleuze’s perspective, Adorno’s approach—which he, apart from a brief remark in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 99), does not explicitly discuss—thus appears as an incomplete fulfillment of Kant’s Copernican turn. Adorno shares Deleuze’s concern to radicalize Kantian philosophy by opening up thought to sensibility. But by insisting that the expressions of the unconscious must be translated back into consciousness, he seems to stop halfway. For Deleuze, the turn toward sensibility remains unfinished as long as the expressions of the unconscious become relevant “only in relation to the identical” (Deleuze 2014, 347)—as in Adorno’s dialectical approach, where the unconscious primarily serves as an indicator of the failure of conscious acts and identity-based practices. Accordingly, Deleuze characterizes dialectics as the “ideology of ressentiment” (Deleuze 2006, 121): a primordial repression of the unconscious’s differential expressions, followed by an attempt to interpret a negativity that arises only through this distortion of difference (cf. ibid.). From this standpoint, Adorno’s continued, albeit dialectical, attachment to the idea of knowledge reveals an inability to break entirely free from Kantian conceptual domination—an inability with self-undermining consequences: although Adorno’s conception of critique seeks to lend a voice to suffering and to denounce social pathologies, by maintaining knowledge as the ultimate aim, it remains entangled in the repression of desire—thus producing the very opposite of what it intends. For Deleuze, a genuine emancipation of thought can only consist in To Have Done with Judgment (Deleuze 1997)—that is, in abandoning the act of judging altogether, and instead unfolding aesthetically the productive excess of desire that emerges only after this farewell to the epistemological paradigm.

Needless to say, the constellation looks different from Adorno’s perspective—though perhaps less different than one might initially expect. For here, too, surprising affinities between the two positions emerge. Even though Adorno does not possess a fully developed concept of productive desire as a utopian force, his work contains numerous indications that he attributes a utopian dimension to pleasure or desire. Thus, in Minima Moralia he writes: “He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, which, satisfying the ultimate intention, is intentionless, has a stable and valid idea of truth” (Adorno 2005, 61). Moreover, there are passages in which he—much like Deleuze—conceives of the unconscious as a form of subjective nonidentity that exists in its own right, without needing to be translated back into consciousness. “The subject’s nonidentity without sacrifice would be utopian” (Adorno 2004, 281), Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, and specifies: “Reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them” (ibid., 6). Why, then, does Adorno nevertheless insist on his dialectical mode of critique, which continually translates the expressions of the unconscious back into consciousness? The subjunctive mood in these formulations offers a clue: nonidentity…would be utopian, reconcilement…would release. In a utopian condition, human drives could indeed be affirmed in such an immediate way. But from Adorno’s perspective, any such direct affirmation is not only futile under present conditions but also dangerous. Adorno does not simply reject Deleuze’s position—indeed, he shares several of its premises—but he doubts its feasibility within an unreconciled world. For him, Deleuze’s conception of imageless thought—and with it his understanding of critique—thus appears utopian in the negative sense of the term.

What is decisive for Adorno’s assessment is his conviction that desire in bourgeois society is profoundly obstructed or distorted. The cause, in his view, is not—as Deleuze assumes—the persistence of judgment and epistemology, but rather the power of social totality itself. The law of identity, Adorno writes, “is not a cogitative law, however. It is real” (ibid., 6). What Deleuze describes as productive desire thus appears, from Adorno’s standpoint, as a symptom of a false society—itself an expression of resentment. “The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resentment, and he bears all the stigmas of degradation under the burden of unfree—moreover, manual—labor” (Adorno 1997, 48). Once again using the subjunctive, Adorno formulates a sentence that reads like a critical rejoinder to Deleuze’s conception of critique: “what would be true is the thought that wants [wünscht] the right thing” (Adorno 2004, 93). Yet in a society that deforms desire, Adorno argues, critique cannot dispense with the idea of knowledge. As long as one lives within such conditions, what is possible is not an inversion of Kant’s Copernican revolution but an axial turn; not the aesthetic unfolding of desire into new forms, but the sustained effort to translate suffering back into consciousness. “But when a man can do nothing that will not threaten to turn out for the worst even if meant for the best, he will be bound to start thinking” (ibid., 245).

Critique and the Unconscious Today

The reason why Adorno’s and Deleuze’s conceptions of critique diverge so profoundly ultimately lies in their differing assessments of desire and the unconscious within bourgeois society. Is desire a resource of emancipation that thought must unfold in order to transform social relations? Or is it itself already permeated and deformed by those relations, such that philosophical reflection can only relate to the unconscious in order to decipher, within its expressions, the contradictions of society? Whereas Deleuze conceives of desire as a creative, productive force capable of generating new forms of life, Adorno regards it as a socially deformed element whose truth appears only negatively—in suffering.

Rather than casting this divergence as a question of which theory is “right” about desire and the unconscious in bourgeois society and which is “wrong,” it seems more productive to historicize both assessments. Each thinker’s conception of desire reflects the distinct social and political contexts in which it emerged. Although Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition were written almost contemporaneously (1966 and 1968), they emerge from two entirely different experiential worlds. Adorno’s thought is shaped by the analysis of the culture industry, which binds the desires of subjects within economic and ideological circuits of valorization, and by the legacy of fascism, in which he identifies the collective unleashing of distorted desires (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Desire, for Adorno, is therefore something that can only be critically deciphered, not affirmed. Deleuze, by contrast, writes Difference and Repetition in the atmosphere of the emerging May ’68—a historical moment in which desire could appear as the motor of spontaneous social transformation. For him, the unconscious is the site where the power of the new arises. Such a historicizing reading allows us to understand both theories not as competing truth claims about the relation between philosophy, critique and psychoanalysis, but as two possible responses to the question of how critical thinking can relate to the unconscious—each grounded in a specific historical situation and motivated by distinct concerns. Deleuze’s affirmation of desire and Adorno’s distrust of it thus mark two necessary, yet tension-laden poles of philosophical reflection on the relationship between thought, the unconscious, and society.

What, then, do these two theories tell us today? In a present in which the culture industry has digitally reinvented itself and, in the form of algorithmic attention economies, has gained unprecedented power over our desires—while at the same time authoritarian movements are resurgent, politically mobilizing the darker side of desire—Deleuze’s faith in the creative force of desire appears naïve, even dogmatic in its vehemence. The historical tendency at this point seems—at least for now—to vindicate Adorno: desire today is all too easily manipulated, its productive energy all too often instrumentalized. Yet Adorno’s skepticism toward any practice of wishing also proves problematic under contemporary conditions. In the face of urgent crises—such as climate change—thought can no longer be confined to the analysis of social relations; it must also enable practical transformation. A form of thought that fundamentally distrusts desire risks lapsing into paralysis. The task of critique today, therefore, may lie in holding these two orientations together. On the one hand, thought must acknowledge that most desires are ideologically formed and in need of critical reflection, and that the unconscious is the site where social contradictions are inscribed and must be interpreted politically. On the other hand, without desire there can be no praxis—no movement seeking to transform what exists. ¹⁸ A contemporary critique that draws its force from the unconscious would thus have to be both reflexive and productive: attentive to the social deformation of desire without neutralizing its capacity to open new possibilities. ¹⁹