The Spiritless Rose in the Cross of the Present: Retracing Hegel in Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Related Lectures

Abstract

Adorno's afterlife has been a curious one. His ghost glides through some of the most evocative work across disparate critical theoretical traditions, but often without clear course. It seems not unreasonable to speculate that these uncertain inheritances flow from the general opacity of his works, not least of them Negative Dialectics.1 It is in this late, and arguably his most abstruse, work that he sets out to channel and refigure Hegel—abstruse in his own right, no doubt—as the single most important object of his theoretical adoration and rebellion. It is not correct to say, as many of his latter-day interpreters…