CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

that the empirical individual experiences as well as the individual’s psychological
constitution.
The dialectical pendulum has swung back: We find ourselves anew dealing with
the position of transcendental subjectivity. The first part of the dialectic showed that the
view of the subject as transcendental is insufficient: it requires the subject as empirical
subject. Now we see that reflection on the concrete condition of the empirical subject, on
its experience in the concrete social world in which it finds itself, takes us back to
reflection on something like the transcendental subject. The first part shows the untruth
of transcendental subjectivity, while the second shows its truth. But it is essential to note
that, after this dialectical turn, we do not simply move back to the same concept of the
transcendental subject with which we started. Thinking about the empirical individual
brings us to a version of the transcendental subject, but not a pure version, as Kant or
Fichte would have it. It is rather a version couched in terms of social reality: the
transcendental subject is now revealed to be the social totality. 100 The theoretical position
that gave primacy to the transcendental subject over the living, empirical subject is now
revealed to have been a distorted image of a deep social truth; a transfiguration or
sublimation of social reality. The position of transcendental subjectivity as primary is not
a thought-production without any basis in experience and concrete, material reality, but is
rather a rationalization (and a defence mechanism) of the experience of the individual as
part of a social totality that determines the way the subject views the world, itself, and
others, and which it confronts as an inflexible reality of independent provenance. Adorno
100 In terms of this result, Adorno’s view is not far from Marx’s “demystification” of Hegel’s Geist
as a cipher for society and, ultimately, for the economic structure that determines society.
96