Negative Dialects is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.

History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, but also with singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world, or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination. -/- Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential (...) writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments, but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence. -/- More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness. (shrink)

This article explores Adorno’s negative dialectics as a critical social theory of economic objectivity. It rejects the conventional view that Adorno does not offer a critique of the economic forms of capitalist society. The article holds that negative dialectics is a dialectics of the social world in the form of the economic object, one that is governed by the movement of economic quantities, that is, real economic abstractions. Negative dialectics refuses to accept the (...) constituted economic categories as categories of economic nature. Instead, the article argues, it amounts to a conceptualized social praxis [ begriffene Praxis] of the capitalistically constituted social relations, which manifest themselves in the form of seemingly independent economic categories. Economic nature is a socially constituted nature, which entails the class antagonism in its concept. The article concludes that for negative dialectics the explanation of real economic abstractions lies in the understanding of the class-divided nature of human practice. (shrink)

This volume comprises one of the key lecture courses leading up to the publication in 1966 of Adorno's major work, Negative Dialectics. These lectures focus on developing the concepts critical to the introductory section of that book. They show Adorno as an embattled philosopher defining his own methodology among the prevailing trends of the time. As a critical theorist, he repudiated the worn-out Marxist stereotypes still dominant in the Soviet bloc – he specifically addresses his remarks to students (...) who had escaped from the East in the period leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Influenced as he was by the empirical schools of thought he had encountered in the United States, he nevertheless continued to resist what he saw as their surrender to scientific and mathematical abstraction. However, their influence was potent enough to prevent him from reverting to the traditional idealisms still prevalent in Germany, or to their latest manifestations in the shape of the new ontology of Heidegger and his disciples. Instead, he attempts to define, perhaps more simply and fully than in the final published version, a ‘negative', i.e. critical, approach to philosophy. Permeating the whole book is Adorno’s sense of the overwhelming power of totalizing, dominating systems in the post-Auschwitz world. Intellectual negativity, therefore, commits him to the stubborn defence of individuals – both facts and people – who stubbornly refuse to become integrated into ‘the administered world’. These lectures reveal Adorno to be a lively and engaging lecturer. He makes serious demands on his listeners but always manages to enliven his arguments with observations on philosophers and writers such as Proust and Brecht and comments on current events. Heavy intellectual artillery is combined with a concern for his students’ progress. (shrink)

An important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of “hyperbolic (...) reading”, and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy. (shrink)

An analysis of how Adorno's "pure" philosophy can be seen to provide a justification of the rationality required by critical theory.

This chapter examines the notion of philosophical truth that Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, believes to be possible by means of his changed conception of philosophy. What that examination finds is that philosophical truth, as Adorno recommends it, is realized through “singular” philosophical experiences. The critical question is that of how the truths that are conveyed through “singularity” can be understood to have persuasive force over us, Adorno's readers. Also examined is the relationship between the philosophically authentic “singularity” approach (...) and the critical endeavors evident, in the same book, through Adorno's engagements with a range of figures from the modern philosophical tradition. (shrink)

While Adorno has tended to be read as a critic of the administered world and the consumer industry rather than a Marxist, Adorno and Marx establishes Adorno's negative dialectics as fundamental for understanding Marx's critique of political economy. This conception of the critique of political economy as a critical theory marks both a radical departure from traditional Marxist scholarship and from traditional readings of Adorno's work and warns against identifying Adorno with Marx or Marx with Adorno. Rather, it (...) highlights the intersection between Adorno's critical theory and Marx's critique of political economy that produces a critical theory of economic objectivity that moves beyond Marxian economics and Adornonian social theory. Adorno and Marx offers an ingenious account of critical social theory. Its subversion of the economic categories of political economy contributes to the cutting-edge of contemporary social theory and its critique of social practice. (shrink)

The author attempts at questioning Habermas’ and Honneth’s claim that the linguistic turn within Critical Theory of society represents a way out of the “dead end” of the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, who were unable to formulate an action-theoretic understanding of social conflicts. By presenting a view that Adorno, in his “Negative dialectic”, develops an insight into a crucial characteristic of the conflict nature of modern societies, which eludes the lingustic-pragmatist Critical Theory, the author tries to defend (...) and reactualize Adorno’s perspective. The paper analyzes some key aspects of the original idea of Critical Theory, and the “negativistic turn” that Adorno and Horkheimer made with the writing of “Dialectic of Enlightenment”. Having considered the central arguments of the “Negative Dialectic”, the author presents his understanding of Adorno’s concept of social conflict, which is then being contrasted with Habermas’ understanding of social conflict, formulated in terms of a systemic colonization of the lifeworld. Pointing out the weaknesses of Habermas’ concept, the author aims at sharpening the image of the conflict nature of modern societies that Adorno sketches, concluding that his perspective is able to question the framework of intersubjectivity that Habermas and Honneth take for granted. (shrink)

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno's theory (...) of “non‐identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: (...) Adorno’s transcendentalism makes some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess. (shrink)

The concept of negative dialectics constitutes the philosophical core of Adorno's wide-ranging thought. It reflects his attempt both to consider the status of dialectics in the face of a history that has failed to actualize its prognostications and to rework dialectics to make it adequate to his own time. Among the themes considered are Adorno's critique of conceptuality in the German idealist tradition, his critique of enlightenment reason and its relationship to capitalist society, his qualified rejection (...) of universal history, his concern with revitalizing experience, and his concept of the constellation, which he offers as an alternative to existing epistemological paradigms. (shrink)

The dominant view for the relation between Adorno and Nietzsche is that the latter’s influence on the former, in terms of style and content, is primarily to be found in Adorno’s book Minima Moralia. Contrary to the dominant view, this article takes seriously Adorno’s admission that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’ and investigates the extent of Nietzsche’s influence in the conception of negative dialectics. It (...) is argued that there could be a significant as well as inconspicuous influence that runs through Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to the point where Nietzsche legitimately be proclaimed the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics. For those who consider negative dialectics to be the paramount achievement of Adorno’s thought, this claim would be equivalent to the claim that Nietzsche’s most significant contribution in Adorno’s thought is to be found in Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia. (shrink)

This paper argues that the different ways of facing Hegel's system, as an impossible attempt to harmonize tradition and openness to novelty, respond to an underlying malaise: that provoked by the disturbing question of “the actuality of philosophy” after Hegel. That question insistently arises with respect to different paradigms of contemporary philosophy, and is found in critical theory, in analytical philosophy of action, in Žižek's materialism, and in Derrida's deconstructive reading. Adorno's interpretation introduces the tension between universal concepts and laws, (...) transmitted by the cultural tradition, and particular elements that the subject of the action must always take into account. As a consequence, the subject must include what is not reducible to a concept, which enables the construction of a language of experience that transcends the identifying thinking of the concept and makes negative dialectics possible as a theory of action. (shrink)

This article attempts to determine Adorno’s stance concerning two opposing positions in the relationship between critique and normativity. Although he rejects the demand to account for the normative foundations of critique, his negative dialectics does not fall back on the alternative of skepticism about normativity, of which it is often accused. I illustrate this problem by recovering the skeptical objections advanced by Justin Evans. Next, I turn to the young Hegel’s interpretation of the positive relationship between his speculative (...) dialectics and skepticism to pose the question of what relationship now exists between negative dialectics and skepticism. The answer is outlined based on a reading of Minima Moralia under the interpretative key of the idea of real normative antinomies. (shrink)

In his study “On the Concept of Irony” Kierkegaard characterizes irony several times as pedagogue. This alludes to Galatians 3,24f., according to which the law has been a pedagogue (‘Zuchtmeister’ in the relevant German translation, Luther 1984) in relation to Christian faith, and alludes further to the three uses of thelaw in Protestantism. Presented on this background the pedagogue becomes an important figure for the interpretation of irony and its negative dialectics in philosophy, religion and art. Drawing attention (...) to the pedagogue in the emphatic sense might be helpful for a reading of Kierkegaard’s writings (both the pseudonymic and the edifying works) as well as for a genealogy of negative dialectics with all its modern and contemporary actualizations, e.g. in Adorno’saesthetical theory or in Danto’s considerations concerning art and philosophy after Duchamp. (shrink)

This article draws out a critical, yet under-appreciated political theme in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, namely his emphasis on guilt and atonement. First, the article assesses how Adorno’s Marxism allows him to think justice and guilt beyond the familiar legalistic frame. Second, the article reconstructs Adorno’s treatment of guilt as a distinctly political capacity to imagine one’s boundedness and indebtedness to others, and the affective engine enabling us to engage in a political ethic distinct from familiar categories of reparation. (...) Third, the article shows how the themes of guilt and atonement give us a more complete picture of Negative Dialectics. This inquiry also intervenes in contemporary debates regarding the political status and emancipatory potential latent within guilt-feelings, and claims Adorno gives us a path forward to imagine the relation between guilt and politics in a novel way. (shrink)

The primary concern of the present paper is to answer the question, ‘What is the relation between non-identity and truth in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics?’ It employs Adorno’s articulation of the ‘outside’ of philosophy, which underpins the need for conceptual constellations if we are to mimetically examine the non-conceptual thing. Following this a further question presents itself: how do these engagements inflict a critical mark on the Hegelian method of totalization – the dialectic of truth? The essay ends with (...) an analysis of two films, Metropolis and Primal Fear, aimed at separating out Hegelian conceptions of truth from Adornian unresolved truth; the former aimed at a universal, the latter indicative of a non-identical aporia. We must conclude with the possibility that to leave the unresolved nature of non-identity unresolved for truth is the ontological challenge par excellence that presented itself to Adorno’s negative dialectics as it presents itself to post-Kantian continental philosophy today. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Jiddu Krishnamurti. It focuses upon how both thinkers employ a determinately negative epistemology and revise Hegelian dialectics as a manner of ratiocination to resolve socio-political problems. It is argued that Krishnamurti’s negative epistemology is rendered more robust when read along with Adorno’s critical theory, aesthetic theory, and notions of negative dialectics and non-identity thinking. It is hoped that this synthesis of thought raises (...) the possibility for ongoing creative responses to contemporary socio-political challenges over and above either political demonstration or intellectual retreat. (shrink)

This concise yet thorough summary of 20th century continental thought explores research questions that are relevant to contemporary developments in the fields of continental philosophy and political theology, wrestling with the implications of entering a post-secular epoch in both fields.