In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno quotes the passage from Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics where the earlier philosopher says of the artist that, “as a free subject,” he attempts “to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness” in order to impress “the seal of his interiority” on it so that he can reencounter “in the shape of things only an external realization of himself.” The “effort to do away with foreignness,” Adorno writes, touches upon the fundamental operation of the enlightenment, which renders commensurable to man what remains incommensurable. The dialectic of commensurability and incommensurability pervades the concept and history of the enlightenment itself, which—as a sort of a negative dialectic—enacts the conflict between two elements that defies speculative conciliation. Because the incommensurable remains incommensurable, remains foreign and unfamiliar, it must appear as such in the work of art as the latter not merely acquiesces to, but actively expresses, its irreducibility to the known and familiar. That is the meaning of the word “appearance”—Adorno speaks of an apparition kat’ exochén, “appear[ing] empirically yet […] liberated from the burden of the empirical”—: it denotes the emergence of the incommensurable from the field of commensurable fact. We might also speak of the event that disrupts the order of being. In any case, the incommensurable presents as a rift in the structure of reality without marking the irruption of an absolute outside. It articulates the truth of reality that, excluded from it, at once evokes its fundamental trait. It is a non-integral element to which the pre-rational consciousness or what Adorno calls “the preartistic level of art” affords access, whereas it possesses no immediacy of any kind, acquiring negative apparency only through the mediation in the artifact that is the work of art. We might speak of an aporetic organization of the work of art to which each sentence of the Aesthetic Theory seeks to be adequate. Where Adorno begins in the affirmative register, he ends the thought critically; where a sentence begins with a negative, delimiting, or subversive turn, it ultimately opens in affirmative fashion toward what it has rejected. The same holds for the work of art Adorno defines in many such sentences. It is affirmative and subversive at once. It approves and negates. It is empirical and yet not empirical. It captivates, but not from outside. It seduces, but to reflection. It reflects, yet blindly, etc. The work is aporetic because it draws its intensity from an opening toward a boundary it affirms instead of transgressing it. Its artificiality conveys what it denies, the “shudder as something unmollified and unprecedented.” It surpasses “the world of things by what is thing-like in [it], [its] artificial objectivation.” It remains forever committed to the impossible, as the possible collaborates with what is, with power, with authorities. The work, by contrast, requires the affirmation of the unknown and the pact with contingency. At the same time it must not dissipate its energy in esotericism, in magic and obliviousness toward reality. Part and parcel of it is the knowledge that what is possible in sublimity belongs to reality as its impossible, as its boundary and inconsistency, as what is repressed or nameless in it, as its implicit outside: that is, as that in it which eludes.