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

dialectics. The importance of the question of what makes social theory distinctively
critical makes careful investigation of the viability of Adorno’s answer an important
endeavor. Whether negative dialectics ultimately withstands rigorous philosophical
scrutiny or not, understanding its successes and failures cannot fail to be illuminating for
our own ongoing questioning of the grounds of possibility for critique.
Second, although understanding negative dialectics is a necessary condition on
understanding Adorno’s thought, in-depth philosophical study of the logical-ontological
structure of negative dialectics has yet to be pursued in the Anglo-American literature on
Adorno. The reception of Adorno’s philosophy in the United States and England was
initially dominated by Jürgen Habermas’s critique, reiterated by Seyla Benhabib in her
influential Critique, Norm, and Utopia (1986). 2 This critique quickly dismissed the
project of negative dialectics as inherently aporetic under a self-referential paradox:
Habermas and Benhabib argue that Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment
in Dialektik der Aufklärung extends ideology critique to cover the very activity of
critique, and in so doing brings under suspicion the critical capacity of thought in toto—
that is, reason and all its tools. Since they interpret Adorno’s critique of rationality as
‘totalizing,’ and thus applying equally to any and all forms of rationality, they argue that
the critique must also apply to negative dialectics, and thus deny the validity of this form
of thinking. However, neither Habermas nor Benhabib engage in the project of studying
the logical-ontological underpinnings of negative dialectics, which is what I attempt to do
2 See Habermas, Jürgen, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990),
106-130, and Benhabib, Seyla, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. chapters 5-6, pp. 147-223.
2