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

2.2 The subject’s mediation of and by the social world
This section gives an exegesis and commentary of Adorno’s dialectical reflections
on the subject’s mediation of the object in sections 1-3 of “Zu Subjekt und Objekt.” The
passage begins with a statement of the inherently ambiguous point of departure faced by
any investigation of subjectivity. “Mit Erwägungen über Subjekt und Objekt
einzusetzen, bereitet die Schwierigkeit anzugeben, worüber eigentlich geredet werden
soll. Offenkundig sind die Termini äquivok. So kann »Subjekt« sich auf das einzelne
Individuum ebenso wie auf allgemeine Bestimmungen, nach der Sprache der Kantischen
Prolegomena von »Bewußtsein überhaupt« beziehen.” 70 The ambiguity here is one
between reference to concrete and embodied individual selves, on the one hand, and to
the universal structures of consciousness that order individual experience—something
like Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception or Husserl’s transcendental ego—on the
other. Because of the sedimented 71 meanings contained in the concept of the ‘subject,’
70 Adorno, “Zu Subjekt und Objekt,” in Stichworte: Kritische Modelle, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1969), 151. Cf. Pickford’s translation in Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” Critical Models
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 245: “To lead in with reflections about subject and object
raises the difficulty of stating what exactly the topic of discussion should be. The terms are patently
equivocal. Thus ‘subject’ can refer to the particular individual as well as to universal attributes of
‘consciousness in general,’ in the language of Kant’s Prolegomena.”
71 The idea that concepts contain meanings sedimented in them is one that will be explained in
detail in chapters 7-8. In terms of the present discussion, the point is just that the concepts we use owe their
content to a historical process that has imbued them with various meanings, which in their turn have arisen
from specific socio-historical contexts. Every concept has a content that is historically inherited and that
therefore is not “pure,” not free of presuppositions and one-sidedness derived from the historical
development. In terms of the philosophical tradition specifically, the concept of a supra-individual
subjectivity (whether merely logical or ontologically substantive) was at the center of philosophical
discourse since at least Kant, and it took several different shades of meaning: Kant’s idea of the
transcendental unity of self-consciousness, Fichte’s I as self-positing self-consciousness, Hegel’s notion of
the “I that is a we, and a we that is an I” (Geist), etc. When thinking about the subject in the face of such a
variegated tradition, the very meaning of what is meant by ‘subject’ is an issue. All of the senses of
‘subject’ I just mentioned above, though different, stand in contradistinction to a concept of the subject as
an individual, empirical self. It is this fundamental difference that marks the point of departure in Adorno’s
thinking here.
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