NEGATIVE DIALECTICS
This is one of Adorno's most important areas of
contribution. His book Negative Dialectics was first published in 1973.
In many ways it represents a development of his joint work with Max Horkheimer
published as Dialektik der Aufklarung: Philosophische Fragmente or Dialectic
of Enlightenment first published in 1947. Adorno was primarily a
philosopher and his purpose is stated at the outset:
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on
because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgement that it had
merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had
crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change
the world miscarried. (p.3)
I will explore different aspects of the term
dialectic through the following pages. Our starting point is Adorno's first
characterisation of dialectics:
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with,
that that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,
that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy(p.7)
What does this mean?