The burden of this chapter is to recognize the force of art in its ability to disturb the systematically constructed world as an ordered totality. I do this through an idiosyncratic rereading of history, particularly of German Idealism, since (as we saw in the previous chapter) the fundamental antagonism of modernism is located there; at least that is the thesis I am maintaining. Art's destructive power emerges from its fragmentary nature that disturbs or challenges the closure or completeness of a system of thought, of politics, and of society. Adorno (1997/1970) famously based his critical aesthetics on this destructive potential of art, maintaining that ever since Beethoven's last works were composed (ca. 1824–1826, his string quartets), artists began to incorporate "disintegration" into their work. As he put it, "The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality" (45). It sticks out by its very autonomy, which gives it a reflexive edge. Such a position maintains that art is irreducible to any sort of critical, political, or cultural explanation or assimilation, thus cutting it loose to stand alone in its potential as a critique as to how things may be otherwise. Excess is always created that escapes complete closure, yet art remains culturally embedded, opening up questions about the social space it occupies. Its self-critical nature partakes in the historical and empirical realm in which it is produced. Its presentation makes strange, disrupts, and fragments the empirical, since art itself is not caught by the empirical (actual).