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

and appearance to be a self-interpretive and self-grounded structure of reality, where the
relation between appearance and essence is functional and its significance is ultimately
given by the essence. Rather, as I said in chapter four, the dialectical relation between
appearance and essence is understood as constitutive of a second appearance with no
further underlying essence. This is just what it means to say that the structure of
contradiction between essence and appearance that internally defines the social order and
social reality as a whole (that is, the contradiction in the object) is symbolically a cipher
for the pathological social imaginary. The whole social order is understood as
appearance, specifically as delusion. But it is not delusion as opposed to a conceptually
ordered reality that is covered up; rather, it is delusional because it originates in
repression, regression, and the projective mechanism. There is no underlying reality of
which the system is a distorted image. There is only a deeper non-conceptual ground of
significance for the form that determines the conceptual relations of the system. Negative
dialectics is, according to Adorno, the form of thought uniquely able to penetrate to the
third and deepest level of interpretation in social analysis.
6.4 Conclusion
This chapter has built on my interpretation of Dialektik der Aufklärung in chapter
5 by exploring the philosophy of history that the latter presupposes, and, moreover, by
explaining how Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the relation between civilization and
nature fits into their conception of society and the role of critique. We finally have
before us a full view of the second element of the ontology of antagonism that was
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