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

interpretation to be not an ultimate foundation, but rather a concrete explanation and
interpretation of the experience of thought that Adorno calls ‘negative dialectics.’
Everything hinges on the structure of this experience. However, second, Adorno’s
description of the experience requires, minimally, some (perhaps not Freudian) concept
of repression and projection and, if the integrity of these concepts is fully denied, then, I
believe, the logical ground of negative dialectics as a form of dialectical reflection based
on the ontological constitution of the object is denied as well. Let me briefly elaborate
on these two claims.
My first point is that Adorno’s notion of the logic of paranoid projection is not
logically grounded in the Freudian interpretation, but is rather an abstract logical
structure to which the interpretation attempts to give concreteness.
We can try to conceive of the logical structure defined by the “contradiction in the
object,” the “contradiction in the concept,” and their relation in what I have called the
“logic of concentric circles” as a logical model of thought independent of its
embeddedness in Freudian theory. This requires a high level of abstraction. At this level,
the structure just is the logical structure that I have described, which describes the
analysis of any theoretical object of reflection as unfolding, first (1) in a structure that
opposes a layer of essence with a layer of appearance, then (2) in the sublation of this
opposition into a dialectically higher concept of appearance that calls for confrontation
with a natural-historical interpretation of the object, which confrontation then collapses
into (3) a dialectically higher structure of appearance that is internally opposed to another
concept of essence, etc.
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