Towards the end of Minima Moralia Adorno writes:

"The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption....Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects - this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation demands imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consumate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hairsbreadth, from the scope of existence... The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible".

For Adorno, post-Auschwitz thought must remain dedicated to the task of voicing the irresolvable contradiction, as a form of resistance to the modern, totalizing logic of identity, while at the same time acknowledging its own inexcusable implication in the violence of that logic.