Adorno's Negative Dialectics Research Articles

Adorno's Problematic Entanglement with Blackness

Black aesthetics and Adornian aesthetics both articulate and embody what Hortense Spillers calls the “critical edge” of culture and art, and there is a recent history of Black aestheticians engaging creatively with Adorno. Today, however, any constructive dialogue between these aesthetic traditions depends on whether Adorno's aesthetics can be decoupled from the antiblack racism in the genealogy of Western aesthetics and whether Adorno's negative dialectics can be reconciled to the transformative force of art, as that force is as central in Black aesthetics as is the negative dialectics of art. Critically focusing on Adorno's discussion of “the ideal of blackness” in Aesthetic Theory, this article will argue that such decoupling remains incomplete, that he resolutely did not believe in the transformative force of art, and that these issues are connected, at least in Adorno's case. This article simultaneously demonstrates how Black thinkers—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Fred Moten, Fumi Okiji, and Spillers—have long offered exemplary accounts of art that combine its negative dialectics, critical edge, and transformative force while defying the antiblack racism in Western aesthetics.

Improvisation, Identity and Systems from outside

In this article we propose to analyse some aspects of the music and musical thought of the musician Steve Coleman through the philosophy of Theodor Adorno. We will deal with Coleman's relationship to tradition and the concept of jazz, the practice of improvisation and the systematicality of his music. These questions will be treated under the prism of the dialectics of identity and non-identity dear to Adorno's Negative Dialectics. The objective is to try to demonstrate some of the contradictions that circumscribe Coleman's work and how it is built through them. We will deal with Coleman's relationship to the jazz tradition, his practice of improvisation and the systematicality of his music.

Debret e Machado: vozes e imagens da escravidão no Brasil

A escravidão institucionalizada no Brasil deu seus últimos suspiros apenas no fim do século XIX. Enquanto a Europa vivenciava o Positivismo comteano durante o auge vanguardista e promissor da Revolução Industrial, as barbáries vivas do sistema escravagista brasileiro ecoavam não apenas na literatura, mas também na pintura. Este estudo aborda o trabalho de dois remarcáveis artistas dessa época que se serviram da arte para denunciar, de forma sutil e ao mesmo tempo incisiva, a banalização das práticas escravagistas da época: o desenhista francês Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848) e o escritor carioca Machado de Assis (1839-1908). Para fundamentar a discussão, será realizada uma análise epistemológico-comparativa entre 3 litografias de Debret e o conto “Pai contra mãe”, de Machado de Assis, considerando os subsídios teóricos que entendem a relação das imagens como narrativas a partir dos escritos de Alberto Manguel e da perspectiva da Dialética Negativa de Theodor Adorno.

La dialéctica negativa en el joven Marx: Una lectura adorniana de la crítica al hegelianismo

<p class="p1">En este trabajo se evalúan algunas de las continuidades y rupturas entre el hegelianismo y la obra temprana de Karl Marx. Se intenta mostrar, contra la lectura althusseriana, que la crítica de la dialéctica hegeliana acometida en los Manuscritos de 1844 sitúa a Marx fuera de todo marco antropocéntrico y de todo primado del sujeto. El recurso al pensamiento de Adorno permitirá precisar algunos elementos propios de una dialéctica negativa en el planteamiento juvenil marxiano. Esta relectura autoriza, asimismo, la recuperación de ciertos trazos de dicho planteamiento en el contexto filosófico contemporáneo.</p>

Adorno's Negative Dialectics

AbstractThe concept of negative dialectics constitutes the philosophical core of Adorno's wide‐ranging thought. It reflects his attempt both to consider the status of dialectics in the face of a history that has failed to actualize its prognostications and to rework dialectics to make it adequate to his own time. Among the themes considered are Adorno's critique of conceptuality in the German idealist tradition, his critique of enlightenment reason and its relationship to capitalist society, his qualified rejection of universal history, his concern with revitalizing experience, and his concept of the constellation, which he offers as an alternative to existing epistemological paradigms.

Violence in Martial Arts Actor Training

The system, the form of presenting a totality to which nothing remains extraneous, abolutizes the thought against each of its contents and evaporates the content in thoughts. It proceeds idealistically before advancing any arguments for idealism.Adorno 1973: 24Violence is the structuring logic of martial arts practice; martial arts training is paradoxically charged with limiting the outbreak of violence. However, the violence of martial arts practices is generally unaccounted for and made invisible in discussions of martial arts as actor training. In light of this situation, I use a dialectical perspective to destabilise the cohesive force which organises accounts of actor training around issues such as psychophysicality, and argue that violence, in its non-identity with the ideals of martial arts actor training practices, underscores but also threatens to undermine discourses supporting the use of martial arts as actor training. Using critical procedures from Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, I work to destabilise the 'idealism' that conspires to make violence a literal or ethical non-issue in martial arts as actor training. I conclude by reading the invisibility of violence in martial arts actor training against Žižek's Violence to consider what is 'symptomatic' (2009: 174) about the appearance of violence in this context.

Nova ideologia alemã? A teoria social envenenada de Niklas Luhmann

RESUMO O artigo discute possibilidades para a apreensão crítica de certos elementos da teoria dos sistemas elaborada por Niklas Luhmann. Argumenta-se que a leitura desse modelo teórico nos termos de uma atualização sociológica sofisticada das patologias da modernidade se encontra em tensão com a promessa involuntária de mediação recíproca entre sistema e ambiente que não operaria nem à base de colonizações, nem à base de tautologias cegas, num movimento análogo ao pensado por Theodor W. Adorno para a dialética negativa entre sujeito e objeto. Essa promessa requereria outras condições sociais para que pudesse se realizar plenamente e essa coexistência difícil entre descrição e norma, alta plausibilidade e implausibilidade descritivas responderia pela potência crítica da teoria. Por fim, indica-se um caminho para o uso em negativo da teoria dos sistemas como modelo crítico - um marcador de tendências de desdiferenciação funcional que se articulam à racionalidade econômica imperialista do neoliberalismo, em especial, à tendência para a formação de distintas "indústrias" em diferentes âmbitos da vida social contemporânea.

Negation, Refusal and Co‐Optation: The Frankfurt School and Social Movement Theory

AbstractThis article outlines how the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has influenced some key debates within social movement studies. The impact of Jürgen Habermas's sociology is widely acknowledged, especially with regards to our understanding of ‘new social movements’. There have however also been several lesser‐known attempts to bring the concerns of Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics and Herbert Marcuse's critique of one‐dimensional society to bear onto social movement research. For this reason it makes sense to outline the relevance of the ‘first generation’ members of the Frankfurt School – something that is often missing from the most authoritative overviews and textbooks on social movement theory. Presenting a body of literature that often appears as fragmented or only on the periphery of social movement theory in this way reveals a number of common themes, such as negation, refusal and co‐optation. To this end, the article provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of the multiple ways of how critical theory has made sense of social movements and argues that its concerns can be brought into a rewarding dialogue with contemporary social movement studies.

Nonidentity, Negative Experience and the Pre-Reflective Cogito

This paper contributes to the current academic debate on the nature of embodied, intentional consciousness, specifically the attempt to inaugurate a rapprochement between phenomenological existentialism and critical theory. This is accomplished through a critical comparison of the concepts of negative experience and nonidentity in Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and Jean-Paul Sartre's early phenomenology. By comparing how each engages with Hegel, I suggest that Sartre offers a broad, anthropological account of negative experience and nonidentity helpful to critical theorists but that there remains a critical deficit which Adorno's more restricted—and political—sense of nonidentity remedies. Sartre's anthropological portrayal of ‘persistent negation’ worries Adorno but I suggest that it can be understood as a pragmatic presupposition for problem-solving rather than as a transcendental condition of experience.

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature

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

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…

What cannot be said: speech and violence

In this article, I consider the moment where speech becomes violent because it wants to name at any price – something that can be felt as a desire in speech, a tension of creation and destruction. I discuss Habermas' theory of communicative action and the propositional conception of truth that underpins it. That conception of truth can be contrasted to the theory of truth as event, as it has been developed by Alain Badiou. A similarity between Badiou's theory of truth and the latent utopianism of Adorno's negative dialectics shows that, for contemporary philosophy, the first phase of Frankfurt School theorising remains important. A philosophy that is able to ‘motivate and guide the will’ (Habermas) needs to include a non-propositional conception of truth; only with a non-propositional conception of truth can we articulate what is involved in communicative violence and come to understand what the place of what cannot be said is, in thought as well as in private, social and political life.

Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic Philosophy, Negative Theology, and Counter-Education

The later Horkheimer presents mature Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. This change carries major educational implications hegemonic critical pedagogy has not yet dared to address until now and much less in the present era of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the progressive circles. In Horkheimer's work the change from a Marxian Critical Theory to a Diasporic philosophy is paralleled by an articulation of Critical Theory as a new, Jewish, Negative Theology. Adorno's Negative Dialectics follows the same path, attempting to present ‘counter-education’ as a worthy addressing of the present absence of the quest for transcendence and meaning, and as a Diasporic form of awaiting as a self-education for the human stance of readiness to be called upon. The refusal to dwell in peace in the present order of things, the negation of the ‘facts' of the actuality, are but a manifestation of the rejection of metaphysical violence and of all kinds of ‘homes’, dogmas, and self-satisfaction in a world of pain, injustice, ugliness, and betrayed love. Since Adorno and Horkheimer refused a positive Utopia, their mature thought could not promise a better world as a justification for resistance to normalizing education and the quest for pleasure, ‘success’, and hegemony. Homelessness and the moral importance of suffering are here grounded ontologically and become a religious way of life. In this the Frankfurt School thinkers followed Benjamin's lead: it is a kind of religiosity which is Messianic without a Messiah. As a counter-education it holds out no promise of salvation or of redemption. But it might offer a Messianic moment, which will overcome the violence of the governing ‘now-time’ and open the gate to an alternative way of life. Adorno's and Horkheimer's later work offers a framework for counter-educational praxis whose religiosity is fertilized by the alarming resistance to educational optimism in light of an alternative, Diasporic co-poiesis and enduring responsible improvisation.

Negativity and Open-Endedness in the Dialectic of World Politics

This article illustrates the importance of negativity within the dialectical method, aiming to bring clarity to what has been rendered unnecessarily mystical within recent revisions of dialectics, particular in the conception of “meta-dialectics.” The negative element in dialectics, where in the movement of sublation the subject remains undetermined and nonidentical, is argued to be the productive moment in the dialectical movement that leads to open-ended and ongoing processes of change. The article argues that considerable conceptual difficulties arise if one attempts to counterpose negative dialectics to positive dialectics and particularly in interpretations of Hegel's Logic and Adorno's Negative Dialectics that attempt to do so. The two moments of positivity and negativity are shown to be mutually related. If conceived in this manner, dialectical analysis can provide radical insights into processes of social change in world politics that are, and remain, open ended.

‘To Lend a Voice to Suffering is a Condition for All Truth’: Adorno and International Political Thought

This paper explores the ways in which a fuller attention to suffering in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School might valuably inform international political thought. Recent poststructural writing argues that trauma is silenced to prevent it disrupting narratives of order and progress and instead advocates a continual ‘encircling’ of trauma that refuses incorporation into a broader historical narrative. This paper welcomes this challenge to mainstream international ethics: attention to particular suffering provides an important challenge to the abstraction, instrumentalism and universalism of modernity. However, if we simply mark trauma and refuse to incorporate it into any kind of narrative, we cannot profit from the ways in which suffering can illuminate the structures and ways of thinking that create it. Drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics, the paper argues that a dialectical understanding of the relationship between universalising order and disrupting particularity can lead from individual suffering towards a political re-engagement with the universal.

Lost Magic

Through a close reading of Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics, in relation to Minima Moralia and to Dialectic of Enlightenment, this paper aims to interpret the tension between, on the one hand, Adorno's scathing critique of occultism, and on the other, his subtle and elusive suggestions that authentic thought has certain elective affinities with modes of mind, such as are traditionally found in magical theory and practice. This surprising affinity has implications not only for how to read Adorno's critical project, but also for how to assess the relevance of spirituality for revolutionary and emancipatory politics. If immanent critique labors for a re-enchanted world, it may yet be linked to a genuinely spiritual vision of reality.

The Conservator's Gaze and the Nature of the Work

Aesthetic philosophers, theorizing literary critics and editors, and reflective commentators on the restoration of paintings, buildings, and monuments have repeatedly shown that the concept of the work is anything but self-evident. The present essay examines major attempts to conceptualize this problematic area since the 1930s, before proposing a solution based on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics that will help clarify thinking when practices of preservation and conservation are being determined. The language and thinking come ultimately from scholarly editorial activity; the working assumption is that, with suitable adjustments for the medium, it will apply to other historically orientated forms of cultural conservation.

Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality

Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality

Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality

Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality