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

a. The first component corresponds to the concepts deployed in the text and
their discursive relations, as well as the interpretations of the Kritik that
have been handed down to us by previous commentators.
b. The second component corresponds to the social-experiential content from
which the distinction between phenomena and noumena arises, which
content the distinction expresses.
With this clarification in mind, what we need to understand now is the relation
Adorno takes there to hold between concept and object. (After we know what the
relation is, we can inquire into why Adorno characterizes it as a relation of
‘contradiction.’)
Adorno characterizes the relation as encompassing two sides: the first is that the
concept is “less” than the object, and the second is that the concept is “more” than the
object. 317 I now turn to looking at each side of this relation in detail.
7.2.1 The concept as “less than” the object
The concept (i.e., discursivity and its tools) can only go so far in its analysis of the
object. The non-conceptual (material) content in the object necessarily eludes an analysis
that proceeds exclusively with the tools of the concept.
317 Clarifying what he means by the “contradiction in the concept,” Adorno says it refers to the
fact that concepts are at once “more” and “less” than their objects. See Adorno, Vorlesung über Negative
Dialektik, in Nachgelassene Schriften, Vol. 16 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 18: “Der Begriff
bleibt also insofern immer hinter dem, was er unter sich subsumiert, zurück. ... Auf der anderen Seite aber
ist in einem gewissen Sinn jeder Begriff auch mehr als das, was unter ihm befaßt wird.” English
translation in Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 7: “The concept
is always less than what is subsumed under it. … On the other hand, however, in a sense every concept is at
the same time more than the characteristics that are subsumed under it.”
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