As a philosopher and as a social scientist, Adorno’s concern was the violence that is done to life the moment un-dialectical ‘identity thinking’ is reified in society. Adorno saw this in Nazi Germany, where such thinking facilitated the Holocaust through the ideological equation of the proper subject of human life with the concept of Volksgemeinschaft,36 reducing any non-identical forms of subjectivity to
31 As he writes, ‘to think means to identify’: Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 16-18.
32 Ibid, 18-19. See also at 114-116: ‘The thought, which wishes to think the inexpressible through
the sacrifice of thought, falsifies it into that which it would like least to be, the gratuitous absurdity [Unding] of an utterly abstract object.’
33 See Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, 963. 34 Ibid.
35 Ibid, 965.
36 The concept of a ‘people’s community’ that became central to the ideology of German National
eliminable objects. He saw it in the capitalist-economic reduction of everything to equally exchangeable units. He saw it in a scientific mode of research that treats the isolated object as matter of fact. Above all, he saw it in the modern bureaucratic state, in its drawing together of all of these conceits in the administration of life— identifying subjectivity according to circumscribed categories, rationalising everything instrumentally according to a concept of exchangeability, based on a model of truth that resembles an ‘ideology of the positive’ that equates what is real with what is identified.37 Adorno’s concern, both in Negative Dialectics and in his
critical sociology,38 is to work against this potential violence by insisting on
opening thought up to that which remains otherwise than thought, rendered non- conceptual under the order of the concept.39
Having set out what is at stake in this, both in terms of the subject’s contradictory experience, and how facing the contradiction is a matter of justice, I now turn to the underlying problem, or mechanism, that is, conceptualisation. This is also where a negative-dialectical approach diverges from deconstruction. In sum, where Derrida’s philosophy remains focused on subjective constructions, Adorno’s negative dialectics is directed at seeing through these constructions to the reality they articulate. In this, Adorno is primarily concerned with what conceptualisation does to its object, and ensuring that the object is not lost sight of. The German word begreifen is a keyword for Adorno, as it was in Hegel’s philosophy, and plays on the dual meaning of ‘grasp’, as both a physical and a mental enclosure.40 This is ‘understanding’ as an act of turning objective sense
over to conscious thought, in order to makesense of the subject’s experience of life. This is never an entirely abstract act: thinking always involving taking hold of objects, physically, sensationally, in the attempt to comprehend the experience of them, consciously, rationally. For Adorno, there is no thought without an objective basis,41 just as ‘thinking without the concept is nothing of the sort’.42 That is,
37 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 61-63. These examples are ‘un-dialectical’ in the sense that each
reifies the positive identity as the truth of the matter, rather than maintaining the truth of the identity in its relation with its non-identity.
38 See also Matthias Benzer, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
39 As Adorno writes in the Prologue to Negative Dialectics: ‘With logically consistent means,
[negative dialectics] attempts to put, in place of the principle of unity and of the hegemony of the supra-ordinated concept, that which would be outside of the bane of such unity.’
40 See, eg, Nancy, Restlessness of the Negative, 5.
concepts are never purely subjective but always in relation to an object, always with an object in mind, as little as it might be recognised; and yet the relation between thought and object is never immediate but mediated conceptually, the material of thought being an irresolvable confusion of conceptualised things.
Thus for Adorno the problem of conceptual violence is terrifyingly real, not merely the conceit of the intellectual but of the conscious subject who acts in the world.43 Concepts, as technological innovation, as much as a way to appreciate
things, provide the cognitive tools that facilitate the subject’s conceited mastery of the world, that is, domination. Adorno’s critique of conceptual violence does not aim to do away with theorisation, seeing such an end as no less conceited than the fetishisation of thought, and no less violent, leaving the subject blind to how things continue to be mediated subjectively, and therefore prone to domination without second thought. But the driving concern of negative dialectics is to work against the privileged thought of the subject, which always comes at the expense of the object. With a deep love of language and thinking, Adorno was motivated by a care for the object, critically aware of the violence done to it in the act of articulation, as a conscious act of the subject. For Adorno, the contradiction is irresolvable: the solution, neither to stop thinking out of respect for the object, nor to think that thought can be perfected so as to be at one with the object; no solution, but to seek to open concepts up to their object without making them the same as thought. This is about maintaining an uncompromising respect for the primacy of the object, not by withdrawing from the act that would violate it, articulation, but by making the negative-dialectical relation of subject and object critical to every act of articulation. That is what it means for negative dialectics to be directed at ‘the consistent consciousness of non-identity’.44
Key to making sense of this is the concept of the non-conceptual. This is the ‘more’ in the formulation, ‘what is, is more, than it is.’45 What is, encompassed, ‘is’,
42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 104-107. See also ibid, 16-18, 19-21, 114-116.
43 Compare Austin Sarat and Thomas R Kearns, ‘Introduction’, in Law's Violence, ed Austin Sarat and
Thomas R Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 16-18. In this, negative dialectics is just another name for critical
thinking—indeed for Critical Theory—demanding attention to what is excluded from and oppressed by every attempt at identification. On the relation between negative dialectics and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, see Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics. On Critical Theory, see also Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002).
and what is more, remains non-conceptual; being, as thought, reduced to a lifeless form in the hands of the subject. To grasp this, precisely what cannot be grasped, it is worth a brief excursion through a passage from Sartre’s novel, Nausea:
For the moment it’s the jazz that’s playing; there’s no melody, only notes, a host of little jolts. They know no rest, an unchanging order gives birth to them and destroys them, without ever giving them time to recover, to exist for themselves. They run, they hurry, they strike me with a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to stop one, nothing would remain between my fingers but a vulgar, doleful sound.46
This is what negative dialectics seeks to open up to thinking without making it the same as thought: a world that exists otherwise from birth to death, in restless opposition to what would pin it down definitively, its objects striking the subject sharply, whose every attempt to grasp them renders them lifeless. At a standstill, held firmly between the subject’s fingers, its objects become doleful (suffering in abject discontent) as opposed to playing out in a moment of jazz the notes of which know no melody or rest. And it is this critical recognition in the moment of self- reflection (‘I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to stop one, nothing would remain between my fingers but a vulgar, doleful sound’) that negative dialectics insists upon in thinking.
For Adorno, this is where philosophy (by which he has in mind a European tradition of philosophy ‘since Plato’, and German idealism in particular) has persistently failed, either dismissing from the outset the non-conceptual as ‘transient and inconsequential’ and of no interest, or else, when it has taken an interest it has done so ‘in vain’, merely ending up with new conceptualisations of the non-conceptual.47 Adorno criticises Hegel’s dialectic, like every version of
46 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 36-37. 47 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 19-21. Sartre’s existentialism came close to what negative dialectics
hopes to achieve in its attempt to ‘break out of conceptual fetishism’, in its attention to the moment of experience, and Adorno praises Sartre’s early works of fiction in particular in this respect. However, even existentialism does not escape critique, as ultimately affirming an absolute subjectivity ‘indifferent towards every objectivity’: see ibid, 58-61. In this, Sartre pushed the subject’s individual freedom too far, idealising the decisive act of the subject, the decision, resulting in a false liberation, the subject thought separate from its objective conditions. Meanwhile, the object continues to strike the subject unsettlingly, like Derrida’s ‘ordeal of the undecidable’, neither ‘surmounted or sublated’ in the subject that decides. Thus despite a critical concern for existence beyond the structural order of things, for what is non-conceptually apart from the given modes of being, Sartre’s philosophy swung to the opposite extreme; reifying the non-conceptual,
existentialism lost sight of the subject of experience the moment it lost sight of its objectivity. For Adorno’s critique of existentialism, see ibid. For a response to Adorno’s critique, see David Sherman, Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 75-78.
dialectics before and since, for this reason. Adorno’s critique is that the Hegelian system lost sight of its object the moment it was held out as wholly identifiable with the subject.48 This is critically problematic in that the dialectic fails to
maintain its negative thrust and ultimately affirms the possibility of a synthesis of subject and object, of reason and reality. Hegel’s dialectic thus results in the domination of the object by the ‘primacy of the subject’,49 the experience of
contradiction ultimately resolved by sublating the object as an aspect of the absolute subject. In this, Adorno writes, ‘Hegel is, like Kant and the entire tradition, including Plato, a partisan of the One.’50 Any approach to thinking that strives for
such unity—for a resolution between thought and what thinking seeks to comprehend—is to be criticised, and is criticised ruthlessly in Negative Dialectics, just as much as an approach that would separate out the two definitively.
Having said that, Hegel’s dialectic remains critical. Adorno’s aim in critiquing it is not to trash it but to release it, in both meanings of the word: to free it from its confinement, and to work upon it as one’s own. Adorno’s critique aims to retrieve the negativity in Hegel’s philosophy that was so essential in his Phenomenology,51 and push it to its logical end-point, which is without end, a
restless overturning of every point.52 Just as Adorno’s negative dialectic aims to
open up thinking to the non-conceptual through concepts, as instruments of analysis, to release what is dynamic in them, the energy contained in concepts breaking the word of their current lease—the same is true of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics with respect to Hegel’s philosophy. It is in releasing Hegel’s dialectical system through its critical treatment in Negative Dialectics that Adorno aims to open up the conceptual to the non-conceptual without making them the same.
48 As Adorno writes: ‘Hegel’s substantive philosophizing had as its fundament and result the
primacy of the subject or, in the famous formulation from the introduction to Logic, the identity of identity and non-identity.’ Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 18-19.
49 Ibid. See also 48-50. 50 See ibid, 158-161.
51 As Adorno writes: ‘As early as the introduction to the Phenomenology he [Hegel] gets to the very
border of the consciousness of the negative essence of the dialectical logic he is expounding. Its command—to gaze purely at each and every concept until it moves itself, becomes non-identical with itself, by virtue of its own meaning, hence of its identity—is one of analysis, not synthesis. What is static in the concepts is supposed, so as to satisfy these latter, to release what is dynamic out of itself, comparable to the commotion of the drop of water under a microscope. […] Dialectics means, objectively, the breaking of the identity-compulsion through the stored-up energies which are bound up in its concretizations’: ibid.