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

external reality was instead satisfied with thought’s creation of its own substitute reality,
in which its absolute freedom reigns supreme. In this process, thought moved away from
the real conditions of reality and cathected instead the subject, transfigured into a
transcendental and constitutive self whose form institutes a free and logical world.
I am proposing to understand this phenomenon, in which philosophical reflection
comes to represent thought as all powerful and as the creator of what counts as
meaningful objectivity, and in which the external world is reduced to an indeterminate
beyond, as the process of withdrawing cathexes from an external reality that offers no
satisfaction and re-directing them to the subject, the ego—in this case, the transcendental
ego. Just as, in paranoia, the psyche attempts to compensate for the satisfaction that it
seeks but cannot find in external reality by regressing to the stage of primary narcissism
and instituting a secondary narcissism, I interpret Adorno’s idea of how the
transcendental ego comes about as a process in which humanity’s self-understanding
(captured in philosophical thought) regresses to the stage of primary mimesis and
cathexes the ego. Satisfaction is now sought not in something external but rather in the
creations of the mind alone.
It is moreover at this stage that the pathological process of drastic separation from
the object—from nature—sets in. The whole world appears as a creation of thought—it
becomes meaningful and accessible only by being subsumed under the classifying
categories of the mind. The object loses significance and the mind, now suffering from a
sort of megalomania (as is characteristic in paranoia) stands supreme as the legislator of
what counts, meaningfully, as real. “Das Selbst, das die Ordnung und Unterordnung an
der Unterwerfung der Welt lernte, hat bald Wahrheit überhaupt mit dem disponierenden
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