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

a higher guise of the system, where this subsumption is in turn again and again shown to
elude a stable and final view of the object. I would argue that the Freudian theory
presented in Dialektik der Aufklärung is just such an interpretation, and it is justified
philosophically to the extent that it helps us understand concretely the predicament of our
experience of thinking and the way it arises from and resolves itself back into our
experience of the world. However, the Freudian interpretation is just an interpretation,
perhaps a very good one, but it is not a foundation of the experience of thought. There
may be other interpretations capable concretely of explaining and interpreting the
claustrophobic experience of thinking (assuming that the experience of thinking really is
claustrophobic), perhaps even in a more fruitful way than Adorno’s Freudian
interpretation, and I think that the construction of other such interpretations, even if they
are not ultimately compatible with Adorno’s Freudian interpretation, would be in no way
inimical to Adorno’s philosophical impulse but rather fully in line with it.
So, I am saying that the specifics of Freudian theory do not necessarily determine
the validity of negative dialectics. It is rather the underlying logical structure of thinking,
which Adorno interpreted specifically along Freudian lines, but which can perhaps be
interpreted in various other ways, that determine the validity of negative dialectics,
insofar as the latter is confirmed or disconfirmed by whether or not the experience of
thinking follows the abstract logical structure of “concentric circles.”
However, and this is my second point, this abstract logical structure is very
specific and substantive, and it requires, at the minimal level, the concepts of repression
and projection. The logical structure by which Adorno describes the experience of
thinking is, allegedly, a logic by which concepts are related to the object in such a way
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