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

systematic view of social reality but rather a non-Hegelian Marxian conception (which
Adorno assimilates to ‘orthodox marxism’), and this is the key to the difference in
Benjamin’s and Adorno’s social-materialist critique. Moreover, not seeing social reality
as a dialectically woven totality, Benjamin does not have any reason to think that the
combination of his social-materialist critique and his natural-historical method require a
dialectics of suspicion: thus the other center of gravity in the Adorno-Benjamin debate,
which is the lack of theoretical mediation between the social-materialist and the inverse-
theological elements in Benjamin’s dialectical images.
In the end, we can say that while Benjamin provided Adorno with one of the main
critical strands in his thought, the natural-dialectical or inverse “theological” strand,
Benjamin did not incorporate in his thought the systematic-dialectical strand, which, for
reasons we have already discussed, Adorno considered to be a necessary moment of
philosophical reflection. From Adorno’s standpoint, we could say that the problem is
that Benjamin did not develop the “contradiction in the concept” (see chapter 7),
precisely because he did not reflect sufficiently on the Hegelian status of the conceptual
system and the way this system has come to mediate social reality in its entirety and
therefore cannot be simply cut out from philosophical reflection but must rather be
“broken from within.”
8.3 Conclusion
This chapter has sought to flesh out and clarify the philosophy of language that
underlies Adorno’s conception of the expressive power by which philosophy is able to
exhibit the non-conceptual element in the object (which in turn corresponds to the way in
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