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

materialism). Thus the system, which is in reality a system of delusions, is transfigured
into an autonomous totality whose structure is fully determined and determinable rather
than partly non-rational and elusive from within the system.
This brings us to the other form of contradiction: the “contradiction in the
concept,” elucidated in chapter 7, for this form of contradiction is discovered in thought
by confronting the object of analysis (where ‘object’ refers to a philosophical or scientific
theory, a work of art, a cultural production of any kind, or any other cultural product, all
of which contain a reflexive structure), whose conceptual-discursive elements have the
internal structure of the “contradiction in the object,” with the form of interpretation that
examines the object from the standpoint of its non-conceptual natural element.
On the one hand, Adorno holds that the conceptual, discursive component in the
object tends to appear as self-sufficient and independent from both the object’s non-
conceptual origin in a specific social-historical life-world and the life-world’s relation to
the present (i.e., how ‘origin’ subsists in the present). On the other hand, Adorno holds
that the conceptual element in the object nonetheless preserves, in its rhetorical, material
aspect, ‘traces’ of the non-conceptual element. Crucially, the philosophical interpretation
of the rhetorical, material element results according to Adorno in a conception of the
object that stands in contradiction to the conception that results from the discursive
analysis of the object’s conceptual element. The “contradiction in the concept” refers to
the fact that contradictory views of the object arise depending on whether the conceptual
element in the object is analyzed discursively or through the method of natural history,
which gives insight into the non-conceptual. The ‘constellation’ combines the dialectical
method (since the it is composed of fragmentary dialectical analyses that interpret
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