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

The discursive approach looks at what the object expresses and tries to clarify it,
study it, and evaluate it by looking at the implications of the object’s conceptual content,
confronting it with accepted theses about the world, exploring conceptual inconsistencies
and trying to solve them, etc. The approach is dominated by conceptual analysis on the
basis of relations of conceptual implication and exclusion. But the non-conceptual
element, the social-experiential origin of the object, is nowhere to be found in the
conceptual elements of the object (what the object explicitly ‘says’ of itself as well as the
interpretations that have become part of the object historically), or what this conceptual
layer in the object logically implies or excludes.
This has to do with the uniqueness of the object. The conceptual dimension can
never identify the object in the uniqueness that characterizes it, and it does not even seek
to do so. This uniqueness is rooted in the non-conceptual element in the object. Since
the discursive approach does not even see that there is a non-conceptual element, it
ignores the particularity of the object. We can think here of the example from Adorno’s
interpretation of Kant. It is well known that the secondary literature on Kant’s
philosophy is monumental, and most analyses are concerned with either showing a Kant
free of contradiction (by building a consistent and complete system that allegedly
represents more clearly than Kant did what his philosophy really wanted to say), or with
taking some insight from Kant and incorporating it in some other conceptual theory of
one’s own (e.g. Sellars, McDowell). Both approaches try to find something general and
universal in Kant’s theory, something applicable beyond the theory as it stands,
something independent of the specific words and stylistic tropes deployed in the actual
text, and something that is only contingently tied to the historical Kant and his socio-
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