critique becomes negative dialectics, defetishizing critique becomes the critique of culture, and crisis diagnosis is transformed into a retrospective philosophy of history with utopian intent.

According to Adorno, the task of immanent critique is to transform 'the concepts, which it brings, as it were, from the outside, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is. It must dissolve the rigidity of the temporally and spatially fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real.' ⁵¹ As Hegel had already analysed in the dialectic of essence and appearance, what is, is not mere illusion [Schein], but the appearance [Erscheinung] of essence. ⁵² Appearance discloses and conceals its essence at one and the same time. If it did not conceal essence, it would be mere illusion, and if it did not reveal it, it would not be appearance. Conversely, essence is not a mere beyond. It is embodied in the world through appearance. It is 'the as yet non-existent actuality of what is'. Dissolving the rigidity of the fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real is to comprehend the unity of essence and appearance as actuality. Essence defines the realm of possibilities of what is. When the reality of appearance is understood in light of essence, that is, in the context of its latent possibilities, reality becomes actuality. It no longer simply is; it becomes the actualization of a possibility, and its actuality consists in the fact that it can always transform an unrealized possibility into actuality. 53

Undoubtedly, the immanent critique of political economy also aimed at transforming the concepts which political economy brought from the outside 'into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be'. By revealing how the categories of political economy transformed themselves into their opposites, Marx was also dissolving the existent 'into a field of tension of the possible and the real'. In Hegelian terms, immanent critique is always a critique of the object as well as of the concept of the object. To grasp this object as actuality means to show that what the object is, is false. Its truth is that its given facticity is a mere possibility, which is defined by a set of other possibilities, which it is not. Negating the facticity of what is means acknowledging that 'das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt' - 'The well-known is such because it is well-known, not known. ⁵⁴ This implies that a mode of knowing which hypostatizes what is, is not true knowledge. True speculative knowledge, the standpoint of the concept, is grasping the unity of appearance and essence, and comprehending that the actual, because possible, is also necessary, and because necessary, also a possibility.

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