Two negative dialectics: Spiritual experience and ideology critique in the late Adorno

Abstract

Negative Dialectics is not only the title of Adorno’s 1966 book, but also the name of the theoretical-critical procedure proposed by the author in that work. This article defends the thesis that this procedure is in fact twofold. The first is spiritual experience: an immersion in ephemeral and puerile objects. In such experience, immersion seeks to go beyond the mere classification of these objects; through a constellation of concepts, it aims to open up what the concept alone cannot grasp—the non-identical. Non-identity, in this case, is synonymous with the non-conceptual. This procedure is well illustrated by Adorno’s essay The Stars Down to Earth. The second procedure is that of ideology critique. Its object is the contrast between emphatic concepts—more precisely, those present in discourses of legitimation—and their realization. Ideology critique seeks both to denounce the frustration of the promises contained in these concepts and to show that these very concepts already contain such frustration. Non-identity now signifies the differences between the discourse of legitimation and social reality, which also constitutes the mark of the existing antagonism. The ideal would be a world in which concepts were in fact realized, in which there would be a rational identity between the emphatic concept and the world sanctioned by it. The first model of Negative Dialectics, “Freedom,” is the paradigm of this second procedure.