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

the Logic—i.e., since there is nothing external to the Concept that can be thought in any
way at all—the question of “justifying” the Concept by anything that is not already
contained within it cannot even be rationally formulated. The self-movement of the
Concept as a whole is the Concept’s self-justification; it expresses the logical structure of
everything that can be thought and experienced at all.
I have reconstructed Adorno’s view of the dialectic between appearance and
essence as resulting in the sublation of both initial determinations, embedded in the
logical structure of reified social reality, into a more developed conception of
appearance. The force of putting things in this way is to deny Hegel’s transition from
the sphere of essence to the sphere of the Concept; that is, to deny his leaving behind the
realm of thought characterized by conceptual oppositions to enter the realm of thought in
which all oppositions are superseded in the ultimate essence of reality: the self-
movement of the Concept.
The reason for this divergence from the Hegelian view is two-fold: First, the final
mediated structure that critical thought reveals to exist between appearance and essence is
internally structured in terms of ineluctable oppositions (in terms of the “contradiction in
the object”). These oppositions, however, cannot according to Adorno be sublated in
pure thought. The final structure of social reality thus does not have any of the qualities
traditionally associated with the concept of essence. For Adorno, the sphere of essence
refers to the absolute rule of the logic of exchange relations over the totality of social life,
and over any and every finite element of social life. But the fact that social life is
structured as a ‘totality,’ and the fact that this totality follows an ‘essential logic’
determined by exchange, are only true because reality has become reified, which is a
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