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

philosophischen] is found by looking at the ideological function that the philosophical
theory plays in its concrete socio-historical context, conducting this investigation from
the standpoint of our own social, political, and theoretical situation and concerns. 86 In
sum, the structure of this first stage in the dialectic is as follows:
1. A theoretical concept is considered. It is found to be insufficient; its claim to be
adequate for understanding the matter at hand (subjectivity in this case) is shown
to be false. In order to correct the insufficiencies of the concept, we need to
appeal to the object’s “dialectical opposite.”
2. But the concept is also interpreted in the context of the objective historical and
social totality to which it belongs, which gives rise to it, and the needs for
justification of which it satisfies.
The dialectic thus moves from the realm of our theoretical self-conception to the
derivation of a “contradiction” (or insufficiency, or shortcoming) internal to that self-
conception, and finally to the “objective” realm of the social and historical world, in
terms of which the contradiction gains a concrete interpretation and is thus made
determinate.
Let us enter Adorno’s dialectic of subject and object once again at the point at
which we left it. The conception of the subject as a transcendental subject led to what
was initially the “opposite” conception of the subject: namely, that of the subject as
London: Continuum, 2005), 198: “The only way to pass philosophically into social categories is to
decipher the truth content of philosophical categories.”
86 This is one of the many senses in which philosophical reflection for Adorno should always
proceed from the standpoint of the present rather than as reflection on eternal and unchanging truths: We
interrogate or mortify theories (in Benjamin’s sense) with a view to inducing them to speak to our present
situation.
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