Adorno’s ‘exact fantasy’ rearranges scientific material to dissolve pregiven questions without exceeding its elements.

Evidence

As an instrument for constructing those images which are supposed to ‘dissolve and resolve’ the questions of being, Adorno identifies an ‘exact fantasy; fantasy which abides strictly within the material which sciences present to it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects, granted, which fantasy itself must originally generate. If the idea of philosophic interpretation which I tried to develop for you is valid’, Adorno continues his lecture, ‘then it can be expressed as the demand to answer the questions of a pre-given reality each time, through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of which has its control in the disappearance of the question’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘exact fantasy’ — a central and often-misunderstood Adorno method term: imagination rigorously bounded by scientific material, validated when the question itself vanishes.
• XREF: Echoes the Negative Dialectics method and connects to the construction of concepts as rearrangements of given elements — also parallels Kuhn’s paradigm shifts where the question dissolves rather than being answered.