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

Herkunft and Entstehung, genealogy, like Adorno’s historical method, focuses on the
particular without dissolving it into a continuity, and interprets it in terms of its effects on
relationships of power, the instincts, and the aspirations and norms of society. Also like
genealogy, Adorno’s methodology is reflexively and explicitly aware of its own historical
situatedness and does not claim universal validity—it offers a history of the present.
Again, like genealogy, Adorno’s method is concerned with history as a physician is with
the body. The régard [look] of the genealogist, Foucault claims, is
semblable à celui du médecin qui plonge pour diagnostiquer et dire la différence.
Le sens historique est beaucoup plus proche de la médecine que de la philosophie.
… L’histoire a mieux à faire qu’à être la connaissance différentielle des énergies
et des défaillances, des hauteurs et des effondrements, des poisons et des
contrepoisons. Elle a à être la science des remèdes. 282
This model of the philosopher of history as a physician should bring to mind
Adorno’s approach to the history of civilization, his analysis of it as a descent into
pathology, his analysis of advanced capitalist society as paranoid and the modern
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates
beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively
exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a
predetermined form on all its vicissitudes. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species
and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of
descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the
minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the
faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is
to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the
exteriority of accidents. This is undoubtedly why every origin of morality from the moment it
stops being pious—and Herkunft can never be—has value as a critique.
282 Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Dits et Ecrits, vol. II (Paris:
Gallimard), 149. English translation in Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Rabinow,
Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 89-90: The approach of genealogy is
similar to that of a doctor who looks closely, who plunges to make a diagnosis and to state its
difference. Historical sense has more in common with medicine than philosophy…. History has a
more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth
and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and
degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science.
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