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

objectivity, but rather as an emphatically non-conceptual trace of the object’s emergence
and development in a non-conceptual but meaningful substratum of objective social
experience. The idea here is best understood by analogy with the unconscious in the
subject. Just as instincts and urges contain traces of the repressive development they had
to undergo in order for the ego to develop—traces that are not conceptually articulated,
not even implicitly—the object contains an analogous non-conceptual but meaningful
repository of its historical origin and development. The concept of ‘nature’ or the ‘non-
conceptual’ in Adorno is a remarkably difficult one to pin down, and unpacking this idea
will be a major focus in the chapters that follow. 42 For now, it is sufficient to say that the
non-conceptual is a meaningful, and therefore cognitively significant, but not
conceptually determined ontological constituent of the object.
Unlike Hegel, who takes the non-conceptual to be analyzable in terms of a latent
conceptual element (at least insofar as the non-conceptual is cognitively meaningful at
all), Adorno believes that the non-conceptual is necessarily resistant to full conceptual
unpacking. But, importantly, the non-conceptual is an element in reflection; we can
interpret the object and the object’s history in a manner expressive of its non-conceptual
natural element. 43 So, the non-conceptual is not cut off from cognitive contact with the
subject; it is not a brute substratum, an unknowable beyond, or a thing in itself divorced
from the experience of thinking. The non-conceptual is accessible experientially and
meaningfully, but not through subsumption into conceptual categories. There can be no
concept, set of concepts, or complete conceptual process that captures the content of the
42 See especially chapters 7-8.
43 Chapters 7 and 8 below discuss in detail how the interpretation of the non-conceptual element in
the object proceeds according to Adorno.
43