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

which nature mediates social reality). This philosophy of language undergirds one side
of Adorno’s “contradiction in the concept,” namely the idea that the conceptual element
in the object contains traces of the non-conceptual and can be interpreted philosophically
in a way that recovers the non-conceptual through the construction of a constellation.
The other side of the “contradiction in the concept,” which emphasizes the inevitability of
dealing with the concept as a dialectically structured totality, is thoroughly Hegelian and
has been discussed in other chapters (esp. chapter 4). By exhibiting the “contradiction in
the concept” in the tension between its two sides, negative dialectics exhibits the object
as internally fragmented (“non-identical”) because its conceptual and non-conceptual
components oppose and negate each other. This is ultimately the meaning of Adorno’s
claim that negative dialectics is a dialectics of non-identity; in other words, this is the
ultimate meaning of the ‘negative’ in ‘negative dialectics.’
We now have a full view of Adorno’s “contradiction in the concept.” My
remaining goal in this work will be to bring together the “contradiction in the concept”
(chapters 7-8) and the “contradiction in the object” (chapters 3-4) to draw a full view of
Adorno’s conception of contradiction and to explain how it works as the ultimate
presupposition and force behind negative dialectics. I turn to this task in the conclusion
to this study.
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