Adorno: the recovery of experience

Abstract

ion (which otherwise I have been deeply influenced by). Bernstein speaks of the “logical” aspect of the concept versus its “material” aspect (which, he suggests, is opened up by rhetoric). To speak of a “material axis” of the concept that is “not fully discursive” risks collapsing into the static properties view. The risk becomes clear in the description of what gets cut away from the concept of torture (“the coldness of the branding, the smell and imaged pain” [2001, 318]). I would put the difference this way: whereas Bernstein’s account of abstraction uses Kantian reflective judgment as its basic model, my reading argues that Adorno wants to Hegelianize this through the idea of mediation, where what undergoes abstraction is precisely the social-temporal contextuality of the thing. 36. This is why I emphasized earlier that negative dialectic is resolutely negative. 37. Also: “what appears as the power of subjective form, which constitutes reality, is in truth the result of that historical process, in which the subjectivity that detaches itself and thereby objectifies itself, projects itself as the total master of nature . . .” (Adorno 1972b, 303); and “the forms that epistemology considers to constitute knowledge depend as much on the content of knowledge as vice-versa” (Adorno 1993b, 65). 38. I shall explain this idea in more detail in the discussion of language and expression in Adorno and Benjamin, in chapter 3. 39. The force of this must is none other than language’s own striving to express experience, to put it into words. I will come back to this later. 40. The term “natural history” itself comes from Benjamin’s book. See Benjamin