For Adorno, solving a riddle destroys rather than reveals its meaning

Evidence

I said that the riddle’s answer was not the ‘meaning’ of the riddle in the sense that both could exist at the same time[, or in the sense that t]he answer was contained within the riddle, and the riddle portrayed only its own appearance and contained the answer within itself as intention. Far more, the answer stands in strict antithesis to the riddle, needs to be constructed out of the riddle’s elements, and destroys the riddle, which is not meaningful, but meaningless, as soon as the answer is decisively given to it. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 197

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s distinctive use of the riddle category as a dialectical structure, counter to ordinary reading.
• DEEPTHINKING: The view that the answer does not reside in the riddle but is constructed from its elements and destroys it as meaningless is a dense, counterintuitive epistemic structure worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: For Adorno, destroying reified language and submitting to another language coincide — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2250; Art’s enigma lies in its truth content and the unanswerable claim to meaning — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2741