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

The question I pursue in this and the following chapter is how Adorno’s notion of
antagonism, understood as the above twofold heteronomy, constitutes the ontological
ground for dialectical contradiction in subjective reflection. In this chapter, I focus on the
first of the two forms of heteronomy involved in Adorno’s notion of antagonism: that is,
internal heteronomy. I show that this first form of heteronomy is the ontological ground
for the “contradiction in the object.” Later, chapters 5 and 6 will give an account of the
second form of heteronomy, and chapter 7 will show that it stands at the basis of the
“contradiction in the concept.”
As I have said, this chapter focuses on the first element of Adorno’s ontology of
antagonism: internal heteronomy, or the determination of every finite realm of social life
by the principle of exchange. In section 1, I submit this element of Adorno’s social
ontology to close examination, and I explore its consequences for the structure of thought
in general. In section 2, I show that Adorno’s view of internal heteronomy corresponds
to a conception of both the concrete structure of social reality, and the conceptual
structure of thought, as defined by irreconcilable tension between a sphere of ‘essence’
and a sphere of ‘appearance.’ This tension just is the “contradiction in the object.”
Section 3 fleshes out my analysis of Adorno’s conception of the relation between
appearance and essence that defines the “contradiction in the object” by considering
Kantian and Hegelian objections to it.
My main concern in sections 1-3 is thus to clarify the structure of the
“contradiction in the object,” which defines both social reality and the form of dialectical
reflection uniquely suited to reproducing the complex structure of that reality without
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