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

processes of thought and being are impelled forward by speculative rationality, where the
latter is the teleological motor of the dialectic. In Hegel’s philosophy, then, dialectical
movement in general presupposes “the absolute system.”
1.2 Adorno’s critique of Hegel
With these points in mind, I turn to a discussion of Adorno’s appropriation of the
Hegelian notion of determinate negation. Adorno argues that, even while we must reject
the completed Hegelian system—that is, the closure of the dialectic into a finally
reconciled total system to which nothing is external, which just means the ‘absoluteness’
of the system—we can, and indeed must, hold on to the Hegelian idea that philosophical
reflection proceeds dialectically through successive applications of determinate
negation. 26 Adorno endorses, at least in words, the specifically Hegelian doctrine of
determinate negation, disparaging only the moment of positivity that, he claims, follows
upon the steps of determinate negation in Hegel. Adorno thus has the following view of
Hegel: We keep determinate negation; we deny the absolute status of Hegel’s system.
26 See, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer:
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 46, where Adorno
assimilates Hegel’s call for determinate negation to philosophical respect for Bilderverbot—a respect we
ought to follow and foster—but claims that, in his final complete system of identity, Hegel violates the
Bilderverbot and thus also his own call for determinate negation. (English reference in trans. Jephcott,
Edmund, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 18.) See also Adorno,
Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 44-45, where Adorno claims of
his own concept of negativity, “daß darin die Anweisung steckt zu dem, was bei Hegel bestimmte Negation
heißt” [that it contains a pointer to what Hegel calls determinate negation]. In this text, Adorno emphasizes
that his concept of negativity is not just abstract negation, and that the latter would transform itself into a
“schlechte Positivität” [bad positivity], and he adds: “Aber trotzdem soll man bei dieser Haltung [der
abstrakten Negativität] nicht stehenbleiben. Eben das liegt in der Forderung der bestimmten Negation.”
Cf. Livingstone’s translation in Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008),
26: “[W]e cannot allow this [merely abstract negativity] to be the end of the story, and this is what is
implied in the call for determinate negation.”
26