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46 | What is Dialectics? Part V: Adorno's Negative Dialectics (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-22 10:01:02
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2026-06
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Content

In this patron-exclusive episode, we continue our series on the concept of dialectics by talking about Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. We reflect on what a non-closed dialectical system would look like, why Adorno is definitely not the defeatist he’s often caricatured as being, and what it means for us to hold onto utopian promises for a better world from within the administered nightmare of modern capitalism. Along the way we try to hone in on what’s special about Adorno’s negative dialectics, especially in comparison with what we get out of Kant and Hegel. And we give Heidegger an appropriately hard time for being just the worst.

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References:

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007).

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

Peter Gates

It seems like there is a role for a very substantive notion of reason in Adorno's thought, because it is reason’s job "to say what something is,” to express what an object would be if it had “all the properties of its ideal state,” a free society for instance. (Quoting from Gillian Rose who is helpful). I don’t know if this is a relation of adequation so much as a releasing of the concept from its epistemological-subjective prison and binding it to an object that is ‘negative’ in the sense that its utopian content remains to be materially and historically fulfilled. It’s a complicated relation for sure, subject to many reversals, and almost forces a personification of the object as struggling to emanate a good concept of itself.