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

fragments and their rhetorical form of presentation in a constellation (we will return to
the topic of the constellation in chapter 8). In the expression of somatic experience as an
experience of reflection—in what Adorno calls a geistige Erfahrung (an “intellectual”
experience)—the systematic relations among concepts, and their arrangement into
fragmentary bits ordered in a manner that rhetorically expresses the non-conceptual,
come together to express not the object in its fullness but the specific character of the
non-identity between concept and object—that is, the specific way in which the relation
of concept to object participates in the pathology of modernity.
We have now come full circle: From the idea that the concept is “more than” the
object (because the concept distorts the object by appearing to eliminate its non-
conceptual element), we have traced our way to the idea that the concept is “less than”
the object (that it cannot reach the non-conceptual through its discursive tools but
nonetheless remains bound to non-conceptuality through its rhetorical elements). The
logical connection between the two ideas is the logic of repression and paranoid
projection, and the concrete site where concept and object meet and their pathological
relation to each other is “announced” is the somatic experience of the lived body.
In conclusion, let us sum up and briefly reflect on the meaning of the
“contradiction in the concept.” This ‘contradiction’ refers to the relation between
concept and object under conditions of repression and paranoid projection. In what sense
is there a ‘contradiction’ at stake here? Adorno’s use of the term ‘contradiction’ is not
gratuitous, and I want to propose that the “contradiction in the concept” refers to a whole
family of contradictions between the concept and its discursive functions, on the one
hand, and the rhetorical element in conceptual language, on the other. The following
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