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

would be the case if exchange was a cipher for the advance of Geist or if it represented
humanity’s advance toward freedom through technological progress—but is rather a non-
self-justifying dead end. When social analysis reveals the contradiction between
appearance and essence, the contradiction in the object cannot be sublated [aufgehoben]
into a non-contradictory higher concept because the contradiction is itself the ultimate
meaning of the social totality as determined by exchange, and it has no deeper ground at
the level of social-historical analysis. It only has a “deeper ground” of intelligibility in its
relation to the level of ‘nature’—that is, in the meaning that can be ascribed to it through
the kind of ‘natural history’ that interprets it as symptomatic of paranoid pathology. But
this kind of ‘natural’ interpretation is an explanation, not a resolution, of the
contradiction. And this is exactly why the contradiction, when it becomes self-conscious
in social analysis, becomes a mere “appearance” without an underlying essence (see my
discussion in chapter 4). There is no ultimate ground behind the contradiction, nor can
the contradiction be taken to be a self-grounding ultimate essence because it is a cipher
for pathological delusion rather than a final, harmonious ontological structure of reality.
The contradiction in the object, as conceived by Adorno, cannot be resolved, and its
analysis does not give way to a “higher” understanding of an underlying essence, but
rather yields only the realization that the contradiction is both final, and a mere
appearance without further ground.
The idea that the contradiction is both the dead end of social analysis—the final
“result”—and that it is nonetheless a “mere appearance”—that is, neither grounded in an
underlying essence nor self-grounding—is difficult because there is a temptation to think
that the final result of analysis, especially if it claims to describe the structure of the
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