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

that they repress the non-conceptual in the object, a logic by which concepts are in fact
constituted by a denial of nature that is specifically projective (in the sense of paranoid
projection), and where this projective mechanism accounts not only for the repressive
relation between concepts and objects but also for the systematic and rigid structure of
conceptuality. In other words, we need to have both a systematic structure characteristic
of concepts, and a ‘natural element’ in both concepts and objects, where the system is
related to the natural element through its origin in paranoid projection. This structure
may be interpreted (that is, concretely described) through a theory that is not specifically
Freudian, but it cannot be interpreted by just any theory whatsoever. The theory must, at
the very least, have room for some notion of repression and projection as constitutive of
the concept, of the object, and of the relation between the two. If the validity of the
notions of ‘repression’ and ‘projection’ is completely denied, then, I think, the logical
ground of negative dialectics is denied as well. So, for instance, if one endorses
Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, it becomes impossible, in my view at
least, to salvage the preconditions for understanding negative dialectics as a form of
Entwicklungsdialektik grounded in the ontological, repressive relation between concepts
and objects. 413
413 Foucault’s criticisms of psychoanalysis and, in particular, of the repressive hypothesis, do not
all contradict Adorno’s philosophical position, but there are two claims that Foucault makes that are
extremely problematic for Adorno, and specifically for my reconstruction of Adorno’s negative dialectics.
The first is an empirical claim: Foucault argues that power in society is not in fact structured in accordance
with repression. In fact, Foucault argues that the model of power assumed by the repressive hypothesis
remains tied to an obsolete legal-juridical model of power that is still based on the idea of the sovereign.
For Foucault, however, power is structured in a different way in modern society: it is a diffuse “field” of
“force relations,” always unstable and operating without a unified strategy (rather, tactics and strategy codetermine
each other), and always delineating possibilities for reversal, resistance, and the appropriation of
discourses in unpredictable ways. For Adorno, however, power does operate in a unified a systematic form
that acquires ever-greater consistency (hence the ‘systematic totality’), so that there is a common and
unified form characteristic of the discourses of power, and this discourses can at best be broken down and
resisted but not appropriated and reversed. (Of course, for Adorno, the ‘breaking-down’ of the system is
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