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

moreover, a critique that simply ignores the system and the systematic impulse of thought
remains critically impotent: “Kritik am System und asystematisches Denken sind so
lange äußerlich, wie sie es nicht vermögen, die Kraft der Kohärenz zu entbinden, welche
die idealistischen Systeme ans transzendentale Subjekt überschrieben.” 335
But, on the other hand, systematic thought that does not turn against the system
also remains ideological, like Hegel’s system or even Marx’s dialectical materialism,
because it can’t see that the system is a symptom of pathology. The argumentative form
that remains immanent to the system—i.e., dialectics in the traditional Hegelian or
Marxian sense—is legitimate and has critical power only when, by coming together with
the fragmentary macro-structure of the constellation; it garners the power of the system in
order to oppose the system. 336 Without the rhetorical, fragmentary element of natural
history displayed in the constellation, there would be no breaking out of the system, but
konstruieren wäre. Ihre Irrationalität, die unterm Druck partikularer Rationalität sich verstärkt:
die Desintegration durch Integration, bietet dafür Vorwände. Wäre die Gesellschaft, als
geschlossenes und darum den Subjekten unversöhntes System, durchschaut, so würde sie den
Subjekten, so lange sie irgend noch welche sind, allzu peinlich.
Translation by E.B. Ashton in Negative Dialectics (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), 23-24:
In the form of the barter principle, the bourgeois ratio really approximated to the systems
whatever it would make commensurable with itself, would identify with itself—and it did so with
increasing, if potentially homicidal, success. Less and less was left outside. What proved idle in
theory was ironically borne out in practice. Hence the ideological popularity of talk about a ‘crisis
of the system’… Reality is no longer to be construed, because it would be all too thoroughly
construable. Pretexts are furnished by its irrationality, intensifying under the pressure of particular
rationality: there is disintegration by way of integration. If society could be seen through as a
closed system, a system accordingly unreconciled to the subjects, it would become too
embarrassing for the subjects as long as they remain subjects in any sense.
335 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1970), 36. English translation (modified): “Criticism of systems and asystematic thought are external/
superficial as long as they are not able to release the power of coherence that the idealistic systems had
signed over to the transcendental subject.”
336 See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 40.
375