The Thought of Matter by Lee Richard A. Jr.;

Author:Lee, Richard A., Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Redemption of Singularity in the Concept

As I argued in chapter 2, the contradiction that underlies and motivates Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is that philosophy in its identitarian form cannot attain the very thing that set it in motion: thought should be of something and yet, in identifying that something with its thinkability, it pushes out of reach that something. The difficulty of this contradiction lies in the fact that if, on the one hand, I resolve it by reducing the reality of what is to that in it that is thinkable, I prevent thought from ever being about anything other than itself; but if, on the other hand, I resolve it by insisting on an immediate access to the factical, I also prevent thought from reflecting on the factical, I succumb to the “replacement of knowledge by the mere registering, ordering and summarizing of facts.”[49]

This would be nothing more than a methodological problem for philosophy—and quite a serious one, at that—if it were not the case that “[o]ur metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.”[50] Adorno’s argument, at the end of Negative Dialectics, is that actual events that he names Auschwitz have both called a lie to and raised the need for metaphysical reflection.[51] The problem that is not merely methodological is that metaphysics has always been the implicit claim that existence, the factical, has meaning, a meaning that is only discovered in a beyond or in transcendence. Yet “actual events” make a mockery of that insistence upon meaning. However, on the other hand, to say to the victim that “this is all there is” would be an act of barbarism. There is, therefore, a promise of metaphysics that, on Adorno’s argument, can only be achieved through a self-reflection of thought.

This self-reflection is the dialectics that Adorno calls “negative.” Yet, it is also a metaphysics—he does not shy away from maintaining that term—that has materialism forced upon it.[52] However, the materialism that stands at the core of what Adorno names “a new categorical imperative” is not the claim that whatever is happens to be matter, nor the old metaphysical notion that matter is potency that is actualized by that element that responds to thought, the essence. Rather, it is a notion that there is a reality that is not identical to thought and about which thought attempts to turn. The actual events that have called traditional metaphysics into question demand that thought does not turn away from the factical. The experience of suffering, of a fate worse than death, demands a thinking of the factical. However, there is a thought of the factical, a nominalist/positivist approach to the factical, that affirms the absolute fungibility of every individual. For Adorno, materialism, the new metaphysics informed by the new categorical imperative, is just this thinking of facticity that does not, at the same time, undergird its absolute exchangeability. I will return to this in chapter 5; for this

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