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

does indeed correspond to the existing social order, but what it excludes is the fact that
both it and the social order with which it coincides are the product of repression and
paranoid projection.
The very role and raison d’être of the system, whose structure is actualized both
by the conceptual structure contained in every individual concept (since the whole
conceptual system defines its elements) and by the existing social order, is to repress
nature and project a distorted image of it outward. But the system’s pretense to having
expunged nature is specious. Obviously, nature is not actually eliminated by the
repression of nature—an elimination that would be impossible but the accomplishment of
which is not even really a goal of the system, for repression actually requires the nature it
oppresses in order to maintain itself—but it survives in a way that is screened off by
concepts. Where, then, does nature survive? Where does it stir and make itself felt?
Recall that ‘inner nature’ is for Adorno that element in being that is radically not
conceptual or mental, but that is nonetheless not meaningless. It constitutes us in our
irreducible physicality, our animality, and through it we have a certain affinity with all
living things. The unconscious is a paradigmatic example of inner nature, although it is a
part of, and not co-extensive with, inner nature. In a situation of repression, and the
repression of nature in particular, the experience of one’s own nature—of one’s bodily
and emotional dimension—is obscured and already distorted as it appears in conscious
reflection and interpretation. But the experience is always there because we are always
irreducibly a part of nature: a body, understood not as a mechanical machine but a lived
and living body.
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