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

evelatory of the contradictory structure of the object-world in which they arose. This is
why Adorno holds that the natural-historical interpretation of the object in the
constellation reveals the object as a “monad”—that is, as defined by a totality of socio-
historical relations with other things in the object’s original life world. For instance, in
Adorno’s natural-historical interpretation of Kant’s distinction between phenomena and
noumena (chapter 7) we saw that the distinction is traced back to the experience of
metaphysical alienation at the point where the dominance of capitalist relations over
social reality was becoming totalized.
But this interpretation of the object as a ‘monad’ just means that the object is
elucidated in terms of its embeddedness into the social-totality, now understood in a more
comprehensive way: that is, in terms of experiences that were not initially evident, but
that can now be interpreted as arising from the antagonistic structure of society, and that
deepen our understanding of this ‘antagonistic’ order. The opposition initially derived
between the object’s conceptual-discursive elements and the non-conceptual social
experiences expressed in these elements is now interpreted as a whole in terms of a more
encompassing systematic understanding of the social reality that the object expresses.
And, if Adorno is right, we always find that this more comprehensive systematic
understanding is available and has the internally dirempted structure of the “contradiction
in the object.” Thus we are back at the “contradiction in the object,” and it now seems
that it is this form of contradiction that sublates the other, the “contradiction in the
concept,” rather than vice versa.
But, of course, the object as a whole, now with the structure of the “contradiction
in the object,” can be developed in terms of this contradiction—that is, in terms of the
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