Adorno and the Political by Hammer Espen

Author:Hammer, Espen [Espen Hammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317834885
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Although it may seem somewhat unspecified and devoid of concreteness, the genuine political thrust of such a negative dialectic is relatively straightforward, namely to provide a model whereby rational resistance towards conceptual systems that, rather than identifying its object as it is in itself, subsumes it and transforms it into an exchangeable item, is made possible. A negative dialectic forms the basis for an ethics of resistance; it “indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (Adorno 1973b: 5). Thus, whereas the predicate in a predicative statement pretends to exhaust the subject, the negative dialectician points to the lack of coincidence between the many determinations of the particular and the unified and general attribution made by the predicate. Likewise, with regard to idealist metaphysics, while the human subject is the universal that purports to discover itself completely in the object, the Adornian operation consists in revealing the transcendental difference between the object as it appears for us and the particular object as it is independently of our determinations. A third example would be society itself in its relationship to the individual. While society functions as the universal that triumphantly subsumes everyone under its generalized processes of integration, the restless, desiring, rational individual actually testifies to a contradiction between universal and particular. The same negative logic is at stake in the interplay between exchange-value and use-value, or in the difficult relationship between spirit and expression in the art work. It defines Adorno’s critical project. The “good” Hegel, then, is the Hegel for whom (1993b: 30) “philosophy is … essentially negative: critique.”

Since there is no positive moment, no resolution, in which a new determination follows from the collapse of the initial determination into a contradiction between what it claims to offer and what it in fact provides, it is far from self-evident, however, that this should be called a dialectic. The contradictions it piles up, as well as the experiential content which arises from it, are closer in spirit to Kant’s antinomies, for which no dialectical resolution is available, than to the progressive movement of conceptual determinations which is the bread and butter of the Hegelian dialectic. The main difficulty of Adorno’s negative dialectics, as we will see, is that, while aiming to contain a heterological element, it follows Hegel in refusing to conceive of negativity as external to conceptuality altogether.

In a second political moment, which is connected to the first, a negative dialectics, following Hegel, criticizes all appeals to immediacy. Given that every concept is mediated by the dialectical relations in which it stands to other concepts, and that the totality of such mediations in late modernity is deemed to be false and marked by antagonisms that fail to be recognized, philosophy can make no reference to foundations, origins, or principles that are treated in abstraction from such relations. The thinker being most directly the target of such a critique is clearly Heidegger, whose thought Adorno incessantly rebukes for reverting to some notion or other of the Ursprung.

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