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

emembrances. No matter what we may think of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, one
thing that cannot be denied after the impact of Freud’s revolution on the theory of
subjectivity is that the past is a constitutive element of the individual in the individual’s
present existence, and that understanding the self requires understanding the imprints that
the past has left in the self and the way in which these shape the subject in the present.
Similarly, for Adorno, the past survives in a natural substratum defined by the
unconscious psycho-dynamics of a socio-historical epoch. But, just as, according to
psychoanalytic theory, the way in which the past affects the present is not reducible to
some objective account of the events of the past, but rather requires a hermeneutic
understanding of how the past subsists in the unconscious memory of the individual;
similarly, at the level of social life, the past subsists not as a series of objective accounts
of ‘what really happened,’ but rather as a natural element that requires interpretation of
the unconscious life of civilization.
Nature is both the persistent substratum of history, and thoroughly imprinted by
history. In the analysis of history’s inscriptions in nature, we find the element of the
archaic, of the Ur-history of civilization, and, without it, it would be impossible to
understand how for Adorno the present ontologically contains a historical dimension in
itself.
On the other hand, I have said above that the natural element and the history that
can be read off from it are not intelligible without reference to the other level: that of
history proper as a succession of contingent happenings. Not all contingent happenings
affect and change the natural substratum, but at crucial points there are accumulations of
events, circumstances, even accidents, that coalesce with existing natural and prior
288