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

substantial interpretation of the contradiction—or if there is instead in negative dialectics
a different interpretation of the structure of thought and reality that drives contradiction
forward dialectically and thus makes it determinate.
I have now argued that there is in fact such a substantial interpretation driving the
contradiction forward, and that this interpretation just is the logic of paranoid projection.
This logical structure, as we have seen, gives rise to a dialectical movement with an
overall arrangement of concentric circles, where each circle is defined either by the
“contradiction in the object” or the “contradiction in the concept,” and is subsumed under
the other form of contradiction in the next more encompassing circle.
My answer to the question of what makes negative dialectics possible as a form of
dialectical thought thus ultimately hinges in making the notion of paranoid projection
central to Adorno’s philosophy. But this emphasis on Adorno’s Freudianism may elicit
the danger of suggesting that Adorno’s negative dialectics rises or falls with the fate of
Freudian theory—a “danger” that may seem even more pressing in light of the fact that
Freud’s theory in general, and its social-theoretical applications in particular, have been
under strong criticism for many years and basically fallen into disfavor in the Anglo-
American academic world at least. To some extent, this worry is secondary to my
purposes in this study, because my goal has been to show that the Freudian conception is
in fact central to the logical structure of negative dialectics and its determinate relation to
the object of reflection, and whether or not this fact brings on board new philosophical
difficulties to an evaluation of the validity of negative dialectics is a further question
beyond the boundaries of this investigation. In other words, my guiding goal in this
dissertation has been to interpret Adorno, not to defend his theory as a whole. However,
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