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

of subject and object characterizing the reality on which dialectics reflects, is intelligible
only as discovered through the dialectic. This is why it is the matter of thought itself that
drives reflection to dialectics. We cannot avoid the circle.
Consider also that dialectical reflection is dynamic. It cannot be summarized
through a list of propositions. Such a list would capture only finite results articulated in
the course of the dialectic, and yet the dialectic itself is composed not only by these
results, but also by the transitions from one result to the other, and by the retrospective
alteration that new results project onto the meaning of previous results. 64 This means
that, in order to explore Adorno’s conception of the object, and of the subject-object
relation, we cannot employ the usual philosophical method of expounding the basic
theses he advances, but must rather critically follow Adorno’s own dialectical reflections.
Therefore, we will not be able to conduct an “external” study that surveys and evaluates
isolated elements of Adorno’s views (like the studies that the “analytic Marxists” conduct
64 Adorno agrees with Hegel that philosophical knowledge cannot be conveyed as a finished
product by way of a list of conclusions or a description of the thought process involved in dialectical
analysis. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966),
41: “Das Wesen wird durchs Resume des Wesentlichen verfälscht. Philosophie, die zu dem sich
herabließe, worüber schon Hegel spottete; geneigten Lesern sich anbequemte in Erklärungen darüber, was
man nun be idem Gedanken sich zu denken habe, gliederte der vordringenden Regression sich ein, ohne
doch mit ihr Shritt zu halten.” Philosophy, for Adorno, requires a a dialectical experience for which no
description can substitute. “[W]as in ihr [in der Philosophie] sich zuträgt, entscheidet, nicht These oder
Position; das Gewebe, nicht der deductive oder inductive, eingleisige Gedankengang. Daher ist
Philosophie wesentlich nicht referierbar. Sonst wäre sie überflüssig; daß sie meist sich referieren läßt,
spricht gegen sie” (Ibid., 42). See English translation by E.B. Ashton in Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New
York and London: Continuum, 2005), 32-33: “The essence is falsified by a resume of essentials. If
philosophy were to stoop to a practice which Hegel already mocked, if it were to accommodate its kind
reader by explaining what the thought should make him think, it would be joining the march of regression
without being able to keep up the pace.” Ashton renders the second passage above as follows: “The crux
is what happens in it [in the geistige experience of philosophical reflection], not a thesis or a position—the
texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds. Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not
expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against
it.”
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