I agree, he’s been pretty much on the same subject for a few chapters now. I like your explanation of this chapter, and I have very little if anything to add. I think the following line sums up pretty well what Adorno’s been driving home, that Heidegger wants “being” to do what is impossible. In Heidegger’s conception being can not be contaminated with anything existent, yet that’s all it is, the existent pure and simple.
While being, for the sake of its auratic absoluteness, does not wish to be contaminated with anything existent, only therein does it become that immediacy which delivers the legal title of the claim to absoluteness, that being always means so much as: the existent pure and simple.
The above might be an example of what happens when we try to express the inexpressible, we end up with some sort of contradictory nonsense.
To express the inexpressible is the philosophic spur. Philosophy is a form of Spirit, and there is a relation which philosophy has, a “deep affinity”, to that which is suspended. It consists neither of truths of reason nor truths in fact.
It does not however renounce the truth, but illuminates the scientific one as limited. What is suspended in it is determined by this, that in its distance from the verifying cognition it is not non-committal [unverbindlich], but leads its own life of stringency. It seeks this in what it is not itself, what opposes it, and in the reflection on what positive cognition views with bad naivete as committal [verbindlich].
What is suspended is the expression of the inexpressible. And that which is suspended cannot be put into words. So philosophy is a true sibling of music.
The final paragraph is quite difficult, but an interesting take on what Adorno believes Heidegger did. First, Adorno’s condition, what is suspended in thought, is given the status of inexpressible, which the thought nevertheless, wishes to express. Since it’s nonobjectified, it’s sort of penciled in as an object. and this is already to damage it (a false object I assume). Heidegger wants to shrug this off, and with “being” makes the inexpressible expressible, by treating it as immediate.
This creates what Adorno calls a dam within the consciousness, disallowing its revocation which critically cripples thinking. The suspended is no longer apprehended as suspended, causing the drying up of thinking, instead of allowing it to flow freely as Heidegger intended. What is left is a scant trickle in comparison to earlier philosophies which approach the inexpressible through mediations. The scantiness of thought is produced when thought places itself outside of time and attributes scantiness to time.
What was ascribed to the scantiness of time, through the misuse of Hoelderlin, is that of the thinking which imagines itself to be beyond time. The immediate expression of the inexpressible is nugatory; where its expression had weight, as in great music, its seal was that which slips away and is transient, and it was attached to the course, not to the signifying “that’s it”. The thought, which wishes to think the inexpressible through the sacrifice of thought, falsifies it into that which it would like least to be, the gratuitous absurdity [Unding] of an utterly abstract object.