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

internal to the object, and the object is internal to the system by virtue of being an object
that we can think at all, and this means that we return to the “contradiction in the object.”
The non-conceptual always appears, even in the best of philosophical circumstances, as
repressed.
The attempt to think a-systematically is always fleeting; the system always
returns, and this, at least in Adorno, is not just a regrettable but accidental quality of
thought, but constitutes rather the fundamental structure of paranoid thought because
paranoid projection really structures all of reality, and so thought as well. The struggle
to think a-systematically is essential in order to have a geistige Erfahrung of the system’s
shattering when confronted with nature, but also of the system’s ever recurring return. A
form of thinking that would remain a-systematic would in any case be no window into a
deeper or hidden reality, since reality (i.e. our social reality, the only one there is) is
ordered by the system and the system’s impulse to encompass all of nature. It is precisely
this totalitarian ‘impulse’ of the system that is experienced in geistige Erfahrung.
Ultimately, the reason why Adorno holds that negative dialectics has the structure it has
is because its object (social reality as a whole) is structured as a paranoid system, and,
even though this structure has emerged contingently and historically, it characterizes the
historically determined state of the real. Negative dialectics is allegedly philosophically
superior to other forms of thinking not because it escapes the paranoid structure of the
real, but because it experiences this structure in a self-reflexive manner: the geistige
Erfahrung of negative dialectics contains a painful awareness of its own paranoid
structure and its inability ultimately to transcend it.
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