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

conceptual tensions in the object as revelatory of the ‘contradiction in the object’) and the
natural-historical method; the constellation as a whole aims precisely to reveal the non-
conceptual element in the object. The two forms of analysis involved in the constellation
correspond to the object, and the tension between them, because it is a tension
constitutive of the object, reveals the object as internally fragmented.
Let us reflect on the relation between the two forms of contradiction. In the
explanation I have reconstructed above, we began with the “contradiction in the object”
and found that this contradiction constitutes the conceptual-discursive (dialectical)
element in the “contradiction in the concept,” which additionally encompasses a natural-
historical element. The “contradiction in the object” reveals the structure of the object as
determined by society’s opposition between essence and appearance, but the entire
structure of the “contradiction in the object,” because it constitutes the discursive strand
in the “contradiction the concept,” can be confronted with a rhetorical analysis of the
non-conceptual in the object. The “contradiction in the object” thus appears to be
sublated [aufgehoben] in the “contradiction in the concept” as one of its proper moments,
since the latter arises from the confrontation of the former with a natural-historical
interpretation of the object.
But I have argued that the natural-historical interpretation ‘dissolves’ the riddle
initially posed by the conceptual contradictions in the object by showing how the
contradictory structure is grounded in the structure of the social life-world from which
the object arose (see chapter 7). The natural-historical interpretation “dissolves” the
conceptual tensions in a text, for instance, not by resolving them conceptually but by
interpreting them as expressions of objective experiences in social life, themselves
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