Lectures on Negative Dialectics E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 544

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This volume comprises one of the key lecture courses leading up to the publication in 1966 of Adorno's major work, Negative Dialectics. These lectures focus on developing the concepts critical to the introductory section of that book. They show Adorno as an embattled philosopher defining his own methodology among the prevailing trends of the time. As a critical theorist, he repudiated the worn-out Marxist stereotypes still dominant in the Soviet bloc – he specifically addresses his remarks to students who had escaped from the East in the period leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Influenced as he was by the empirical schools of thought he had encountered in the United States, he nevertheless continued to resist what he saw as their surrender to scientific and mathematical abstraction. However, their influence was potent enough to prevent him from reverting to the traditional idealisms still prevalent in Germany, or to their latest manifestations in the shape of the new ontology of Heidegger and his disciples. Instead, he attempts to define, perhaps more simply and fully than in the final published version, a ‘negative', i.e. critical, approach to philosophy. Permeating the whole book is Adorno’s sense of the overwhelming power of totalizing, dominating systems in the post-Auschwitz world. Intellectual negativity, therefore, commits him to the stubborn defence of individuals – both facts and people – who stubbornly refuse to become integrated into ‘the administered world’.

These lectures reveal Adorno to be a lively and engaging lecturer. He makes serious demands on his listeners but always manages to enliven his arguments with observations on philosophers and writers such as Proust and Brecht and comments on current events. Heavy intellectual artillery is combined with a concern for his students’ progress.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Translator's Note

Editor's Foreword

Note

LECTURE 1: The Concept of Contradiction

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 2: The Negation of Negation

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 3: Whether Negative Dialectics is Possible

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 4: Whether Philosophy is Possible without System

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 5: Theory and Practice

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 6: Being. Nothing. Concept

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 7: ‘Attempted Breakouts’

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 8: The Concept of Intellectual Experience

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 9: The Element of Speculation

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 10: Philosophy and ‘Depth’

Notes

Transcript of the lecture

Notes

LECTURE 11: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 12: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 13: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 14: Negative Dialectics

LECTURE 15: Negative Dialectics

Note

LECTURE 16: Negative Dialectics

Note

LECTURE 17: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 18: Negative Dialectics

Note

LECTURE 19: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 20: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 21: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 22: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 23: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 24: Negative Dialectics

Notes

LECTURE 25: Negative Dialectics

Notes

Additional Notes

Notes

Appendix

Towards a theory of intellectual experience

Notes

Bibliographical Sources

Adorno's Writings

Other Writers

Index

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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First published in German as Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik, edited by Rolf Tiedemann © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2003

This English edition © Polity Press, 2008

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3509-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3510-1 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9457-3 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9364-4 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Translator's Note

The German word Geist (spirit, mind, intellect) and its adjective geistig have presented particular difficulties in this translation. Normally, the translator tries to achieve consistency, but that has proved hard in this instance. Geist is commonly translated as ‘spirit’ (as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit), and this was an important component of Adorno's intellectual heritage. ‘Spirit’ has therefore been the translation of choice in some instances. But to translate the essay in the Appendix ‘Zur Theorie der geistigen Erfahrung’ as ‘The Theory of Spiritual Experience’ would convey entirely the wrong impression in English, because of the strong theological overtones that are quite absent from Adorno's text. In the published version of Negative Dialectics, Adorno refers to Geist as ‘a semi-theological word’ (p. 38), but those overtones are too intrusive in English. Equally, mind in the sense of mind and matter is normally rendered in German by Geist und Materie. ‘Mind’ and ‘mental’ have proved to be possible renditions in a number of passages, but I have opted on the whole for ‘intellect’ and ‘intellectual’ in the example given above and elsewhere. However, no single term has proved viable in every case. The fact is that the term Geist falls somewhere between the available English words – spirit, mind, intellect – with all of which it also overlaps. Each of these terms seems to work in some instances, but not in all. For that reason I have felt constrained to sacrifice consistency to what seemed appropriate in the given context. Something of the word's flavour can perhaps be gleaned from this passage from Lecture 9: ‘Admittedly, you must be very clear in your own minds that this concept of intellectual [geistig] experience is infinitely far removed from the trivial concept of experience. This is because the concept of the fact, of data, that is canonical for empiricist philosophies and which is based on sense experience, that is, on sense data, has no validity for intellectual experience, which is the experience of something already intellectual and is an intellectually mediated experience’ (p. 89).

Editor's Foreword

Between 1960 and 1966 Adorno accompanied the writing of Negative Dialectics with four courses of lectures.1 In the last of these he developed the themes that stand at the beginning of the book which finally appeared in 1966. They figure in what he called the Introduction, doubtless an echo of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel's introduction, like his book as a whole, treats the ‘experience of consciousness’, or rather the ‘science’ of consciousness, and this appears to have been echoed in Adorno's own terminology when he considered giving his introductory text the title ‘Theory of Intellectual [geistig] Experience’, adding that he wished ‘to expound the concept of philosophical experience’ (Negative Dialectics, p. xx). Adorno did not hesitate to use ‘intellectual experience’ as a synonym for ‘full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection’ (ibid., p. 13; see also p. 82 below). A ‘theory of intellectual experience’ such as the one he sketched in the introduction to Negative Dialectics, and parallel to that in the lectures on the same topic, would amount to something like a methodology of his philosophy, if we could speak of such a thing. Adorno himself referred to Negative Dialectics as a whole as ‘a methodology of his material works’ only to contradict this in the very next breath: ‘No continuum exists between those works and it, according to the theory of negative dialectics. The discontinuity will be dealt with, however, and so will the directions for thought to be gleaned from it. The procedure will be justified, not rationally grounded. To the best of his ability the author means to put his cards on the table – which is by no means the same as playing the game’ (ibid., p. xix). These observations strikingly fail to do justice to the text of Negative Dialectics. Adorno repeatedly emphasized that his material works could not be subsumed under a fixed ‘method’, that they could not be separated from their objects, and that their contents could not simply be transferred to other topics. When we examine his texts, this becomes only too apparent. But what could Negative Dialectics be other than an ensemble of ‘material works’ – on ontology, on the philosophy of history and moral philosophy or on metaphysics; we might also say: on Heidegger, Hegel or Kant or the possibility of philosophy after Auschwitz? At best, the central section of the book, on the concept and categories of a negative dialectics, might be construed as belonging to what has traditionally been thought of as a doctrine of method. And as far as ineffectual ‘Instructions for Thinking’ are concerned – no opponent of Adorno's could do him a greater injustice than to attempt to reduce his chef d'oeuvre to vague instructions of whatever sort. After all, what could the ‘game’ be if not the treatment of the discontinuity between material and methodological philosophizing? Only if we stick to the literal meaning of methodology, to the λόγος immanent in every method; only if we expect no method in particular, but the justification of a plurality of methods and, tendentially, of the various distinct methods of all Adorno's writings, does the concept of method used in the ‘Preface’ of Negative Dialectics, and also in the present volume of lectures, make sense. It would be better, however, for us to follow Adorno's example in his essay on ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy’ and speak of the ‘models of intellectual experience’ that ‘motivate’ Adorno's thinking and make up its ‘truth content’ (see Hegel: Three Studies, p. 53). The verse of Kästner's cited in the present volume of lectures, ‘Herr Kästner, where's the positive side?’ (see pp. 12 and 17 below), could be matched – and can still be matched today – by the equally insipid question ‘What method do you use, Herr Adorno?’ It appears as if on one occasion he wished to make a few concessions in this direction and force his thinking into the requisite methodological corset, only to end up by going against his own intentions and immersing himself once more in material philosophizing, be it only philosophizing about the antinomy of method and intellectual experience.

Adorno frequently attempted to formulate the deeply unsatisfactory nature of all traditional philosophy, its inappropriateness to its subject, its repudiation by the worldly wise. He hoped to lead thought along the ‘only critical path that remains open’, by identifying such fallacies as ‘thinking of a first philosophy’, ‘origin’ thinking, the primacy of subjectivity, the universal rule of domination – and also as the constitution of method. ‘Method in the precise sense’ was for him ‘an intellectual approach which can be applied everywhere and at all times because it divests itself of any relation to things, i.e. to the object of knowledge’ (Against Epistemology, p. 11, translation modified). The approach in question is that of ubiquitous mathematicization, just as the ideal of every express method has always been mathematics, which soared above the lowlands of empirical reality like a Platonic heaven. Adorno claimed to discern this ‘triumph of mathematics and every such triumph’ in the Socrates of Plato's Meno, who strove to ‘reduce virtue to its immutable and hence abstract features’ (ibid.). Abstraction is the procedure whose every method must start off by formulating concepts: it must ignore the particulars with which it is concerned at every turn; it must make its material manageable, that is to say, capable of being controlled. But the methodologists and logicians are mistaken in their belief that only by such means will they be able to gain a hold on the general as the other of the particular, the finite, the existent; just as mathematics is a gigantic tautology ‘which exerts a total dominance over what it has itself prepared and formed’ (ibid.; see also p. 27 below), so too methods are always concerned with themselves, with the flimsiest, most abstract vestige of what they have reduced the world to by treating anything and everything only in terms of general concepts, while declining to engage with the object itself. In this dire situation idealism has made a virtue of deducing every not-I from the I, of defining every object as a subject or, as they call it, of ‘postulating’ the former by means of the latter: each thing is like this and not otherwise and it is subject to the rule of subjectivity to which it has owed its very existence from the outset. Understood in this way, such methods come together in the societal model on which they are based: the principle of equivalence of the barter society in which use values appear only as quantities, as exchange values, as values comparable in money terms, not as distinct qualities. In the ‘Introduction’ to Against Epistemology, Adorno gave an account, one not yet adequately appreciated, of what, despite Kant and lasting well beyond his work, we must call the ‘uncritical’ path taken by both mind and reality. It is a truly philosophical account of the history of philosophy, and at the same time a literary feat in the linguistic desert that has prevailed in the world of German-language thought since Nietzsche's death. Adorno's ‘second introduction’, that to Negative Dialectics, is the continuation of that first one, since it progresses from a critical, negative methodology to a negative-dialectical one.

Adorno advanced the idea of philosophical or, more generally, intellectual experience as a weapon with which to oppose the fetishism of method. By this he meant starting out from the concrete individual, the individuum ineffabile; he insisted that it was vital to dwell on the individual thing and entrust oneself to it, without confining oneself entirely to this trusting stance. In contrast to the abstracting method, intellectual experience is interested in differences, not in what makes things identical with other things; ‘what is meant by negative dialectics – the dialectics not of identity but of non-identity’ (p. 1 below). There can be no doubt that Adorno's emphatic use of the concept of experience stresses its closeness both to Aristotle's and to what English empiricism understands by ‘experientia’ and ‘experience’: namely the belief that the kind of thinking to which negative dialectics aspires is subject to the primacy of the individual; that it consists of the gaze of an individual fixed on individual beings or that it at least starts from there. It is in this sense that Adorno could maintain that the ‘turn’ he was striving for ‘includes a salvaging of empiricism, albeit in a somewhat convoluted, dialectical fashion. That means that cognition always proceeds in principle from below to above, and not from the top down; it is concerned with leaving things to themselves and not with a process of deduction’ (see p. 82 below). That ‘includes’ is crucial: Adorno's empiricist turn is also a salvaging of empiricism, but by no means the old or a new empiricism. According to Isaiah Berlin, ‘an alliance of mysticism and empiricism against rationalism’ was to be found in such figures as J. G. Hamann, a man with whom Adorno had a certain affinity despite his hostility to many of Hamann's ideas. (See Isaiah Berlin, J. G. Hamann und der Ursprung des modernen Irrationalismus, trans. Jens Hagerstadt, Berlin, 1995, p. 74; see also History and Freedom, p. 103 and note 10, p. 292ff.) In contrast to Hamann, we may characterize Adorno's thought as consisting of an alliance of rationalism and empiricism against mysticism. ‘The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unravelling it.’ That is Adorno's view of the specific nature of ‘The Essay as Form’ (Notes on Literature, vol. 1, p. 13), of the ‘essayistic thinker’ who is no philosopher, however close he may become to being one. In contrast, the philosopher sees his task precisely in ‘unravelling’ the experience he is exploring; thinking actually coincides with ‘unravelling’ his experience of the facta bruta. Experience is one thing, the intellect another. While Locke maintained that all thought is based on experience, Leibniz's doctrine of ideas cannot be left out of account: nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse [There is nothing in the mind that was not already present in the senses – except the mind itself]; for experience to become intellectual experience, experience must be penetrated and transcended by intellect. However, that will not work, an insight Adorno shared with Hölderlin. ‘Spirit is not what it enthrones itself as, the Other, the transcendent in its purity, but rather is also a piece of natural history. … Reality's spell over spirit prevents spirit from doing what its own concept wants to do when faced with the merely existent: to fly’ (‘Progress’, Critical Models, p. 156f.). Experience alone, experience as such, does not suffice; only where experience acquires an intellectual dimension – the ‘additional factor’ without which a negative dialectics cannot thrive – can existing reality yield up those evanescent ‘traces of otherness’, fragile pointers to the fact that ‘what exists, is not all that exists’. The irrational element that may be inherent in this is nevertheless far from implying an endorsement of irrationalism. On the contrary, ‘Whoever thinks philosophically hardens intellectual experience by testing it against the same logical consistency at whose opposite pole he functions. In the absence of that, intellectual experience would remain rhapsodic. Only in this way can reflection become more than a repetitious presentation of what is experienced’ (‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’, Critical Models, p. 133, translation modified). But this merely provides confirmation that intellectual experience cannot subsist in a loose relation to conceptuality, but rather has to prove itself against strict yardsticks for discursiveness and rationality.

Adorno's negative dialectics cannot be thought of as a ‘philosophy of difference’ in Derrida's sense. Derrida distinguishes between différence and the non-word différance and hopes that this conjuring trick will enable him to evade the fate of imprisonment in conceptuality. But by the same token, now that idealism is dead, we can no longer speak of an identity of object and subject, whether given or to be established. Things and words no longer coincide in the sense that we might say that the latter contained the meaning of the former. For negative dialectics ‘the thing itself is by no means a thought product. It is non-identity through identity’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 189). What is needed to achieve the objective specificity of a thing is a greater effort on the part of the subject, not a smaller one; what is needed is ‘a more sustained subjective reflection than the identifications of which Kant taught that consciousness performs them, as it were, unconsciously and automatically. That the activity of the mind, and even more the activity which Kant ascribes to the problem of constitution, is something other than the automatism he equates it with – this, specifically, constitutes the mental experience which the idealists discovered, albeit only in order to castrate it on the spot’ (ibid., p. 188f.). Thus if the concern of philosophy is with the sphere of the non-conceptual that Hegel dismissed as ‘worthless existence’ and ignored, then this sphere that is ‘suppressed, disparaged and discarded by concepts’ (ibid., p. 10) can receive fair treatment only in the language of concepts. Negative dialectics is unable to abolish conceptuality and abstraction or to replace it with knowledge of a different type, one that would necessarily come to grief on the rocks of reality. Nor does it involve an immediate reflection on reality, but reflection on what makes it impossible to achieve consciousness of things; on the social conditionality of a knowledge that is possible only through abstraction, by means of discursive language. Such reflection does not aim to step outside discourse, but would like ‘to prise open the aspect of its objects that cannot be accommodated by concepts’ (‘The Essay as Form’, Notes on Literature, vol. 1, p. 23). When for once Adorno did not shy away from speaking of the kind of knowledge to which he aspired in the form of a definition, he did not hesitate to frame it conceptually: ‘The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual, without making it their equal’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 10). This non-conceptual realm, however, things themselves, the non-identical or the non-intentional – concepts with which Adorno sought to point to things that were not to be regarded as the exemplars of a species – is not something already given, already available, that existing knowledge somehow fails to reach; such knowledge would ‘be fulfilled only by revealing their social, historical and human meaning’ (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20), but it is potentially implicit in the abstract concepts themselves that compel us to go beyond their rigid, would-be conclusive, fixed meanings. This compulsion is one that negative dialectics tries to satisfy, and, at the same time, the dialectic strives to prise open the categories that have classified and pacified the real once and for all, and to open them up once more to what is new.

The non-identical cannot be unlocked by a particular concept in isolation – that would have led readers to criticize Adorno's ‘mere conceptualizing’ – but at most by a plurality, a constellation of discrete individual concepts: ‘True enough, the idea of classification which subsumes the particular as an example does not open it up; this can be done only by the constellation of concepts that the constructive mind brings to bear on it. – Comparison with the number combination of a safe’ (p. 139). Thus far Adorno in the present course of lectures. The notion of mental constellations or configurations is one that Adorno pursued stubbornly over the longest possible period of time. As early as his lecture on ‘The Idea of Natural History’ of 1932, a kind of first stab at a programmatic statement of his philosophy, he draws attention to his profound dissatisfaction with thinking in universal concepts on the grounds that it seems to eliminate the best part of the reality that the thinker is focusing on, the specific nature of every particular reality. So as to remain useful as instruments, the concept retains of things only the abstract qualities that they possess in common with many others. Adorno's ambition is to present a method ‘with a different logical structure’ from the usual philosophical thinking in universal concepts: ‘It is the method of the constellation. Instead of explaining concepts from each other, the focus is on a constellation of ideas. … These are not treated as “constants”; the intention is not to refer back to them, but instead they congregate around the concrete historical factuality which opens up in all its uniqueness in the interplay with those moments’ (GS, vol. 1, p. 359). The sole object of Adorno's philosophy was this ‘uniqueness’, this ‘concrete historical factuality’ – he held fast to this right up to his last writings, even though he never provided a fully elaborated, coherent theory of constellational knowledge. Not even the constitutive limbs from which the constellations and configurations were composed or from which they came together were always the same. Concepts, ideas, aspects, , were all things against which constellational thinking had to be tested. ‘The specificity of philosophy as a configuration of moments is qualitatively different from a lack of ambiguity in every particular moment, even within the configuration, because the configuration is more, and other, than the quintessence of its moments. Constellation is not system. Everything does not become resolved; everything does not come out even; rather, one moment sheds light on the other, and the figures that the individual moments form together are specific signs and a legible script’ (‘Skoteinos or How to Read Hegel’, in Hegel: Three Studies, p. 109). However unsatisfactory the numerous epistemological and methodological explanations of the concept of the constellation may be, the theory of the constellation was conceived as a counter to traditional theory of knowledge. Its fulfilment is enacted solely in Adorno's material writings, all of which represent the specification of the signs, the reading of the script, which constitutes the existing world as formed by the constellation. Negative dialectics is to be the dialectics of non-identity: that is to say, the truth content of the intellectual experience that that dialectics produces is a negative one. It registers not only the fact that the concept never does justice to the thing it refers to – does not yet do so. ‘In the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as negativity’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 31). This constitutes the philosophical signature of Negative Dialectics and the nature of its intellectual experience.

The ‘introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, like the present Lectures on Negative Dialectics that report on and provide variations on the published book, are late works, not just literally in the sense that they were written and given when Negative Dialectics was already completed in manuscript form, but also in the further sense that Adorno's death turned them into late works biographically speaking. Above all, both form part of the ‘last philosophy’ that Adorno believed to be ‘timely’ once the collapse of civilization and culture in the first half of the twentieth century had inaugurated an age of barbarism that persists to this day.

This edition of Adorno's lectures is unfortunately fragmentary. The first ten lectures are based on transcripts from tape recordings that were made in the Institute for Social Research and are now lodged in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive with the classification numbers Vo 10809–10919. In preparing the text the editor has attempted to follow Adorno's own example in editing the texts of lectures that he had given extempore, once he had agreed to their publication. A particular effort has been made to preserve the informal character of the lecturing situation. The editor has tried to meddle with the text as little as possible and no more than was necessary. After his previous experience in editing Adorno's lectures, however, he felt able to act with somewhat greater freedom, both in the present instance and in his earlier edition of the lectures on Ontologie und Dialektik. In particular, he felt he could make more liberal use of drafts, some of which neither emanated from Adorno himself nor were authorized by him. Anacoluthons, ellipses and grammatical slips have been corrected. In addition to the cautious elimination of over-obtrusive repetitions, occasional attempts have been made to disentangle obscure syntactical constructions. Adorno tended to speak relatively quickly and individual words not infrequently became garbled in the process. Corrections have been inserted wherever it was possible to ascertain his meaning unambiguously. Fillers, especially ‘nun’, ‘also’ and ‘ja’, as well as a somewhat inflationary use of ‘eigentlich’ [actually], have all been cut out where it was evident that he was searching for the right word or thought. Since in the nature of the case punctuation had to be added by the editor, he felt most at liberty to impose his own practice there. He did so with the aim of achieving maximum clarity and unambiguity, without regard to the rules Adorno followed in preparing his own texts. At no point was any attempt made to ‘improve’ Adorno's writing; the aim was always to present his text to the best of the editor's abilities.

In the case of lectures 11 to 25, Adorno's notes have to stand in for his lectures. These notes are archived with the classification numbers Vo 11031–11061. While they allow us to reconstruct the course of the lectures with some precision, they do not reveal very much about the arguments Adorno used. To make good this gap, excerpts from the talk on which Adorno based the notes have been supplied parallel to them on the left-hand side of the page. The printed notes have been kept as closely as possible to what Adorno actually wrote. Where the reading was uncertain this is indicated by a question mark.

In the endnotes the quotations referred to by Adorno have been cited in full wherever possible, together with passages to which Adorno alludes or may have had in mind. In addition, parallel passages from his writings have been added or referred to wherever they can shed light on his remarks. They also help to make clear the manifold interconnections and overlaps in his writings and lectures. ‘One needs to develop a faculty for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to a particular philosophy in order to uncover their relationships within the philosophical context, and thus to understand the philosophy itself’ (Metaphysics, p. 51). The endnotes aim likewise to facilitate a reading that takes Adorno's injunction seriously. They would like to help make visible the cultural sphere surrounding Adorno's activities as a lecturer, a world of the mind which can no longer be taken for granted. The endnotes to the four sets of lectures associated with Negative Dialectics amount to a catalogue raisonné of the important concepts of Adorno's philosophy.

*

I would like once again to thank Michael Schwarz for his assistance. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my friend Hermann Schweppenhäuser, who as always has placed his vast experience and knowledge at my disposal. Since this is the final volume in the editions I have prepared for the Theodor W. Adorno Archive, I should like to record my thanks to the committee of the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur and especially Jan Philipp Reemtsma, without whose support my work during the past seventeen years would not have been possible.

24 September 2002

Note

1

    Adorno announced his lectures with the title ‘Negative Dialectics’. In order to avoid bibliographical confusion with the book with the same title, the editor decided to give it the title ‘Lectures on Negative Dialectis’. Adorno normally based his lectures on brief notes which he then improvised on freely. From 1958 on his lectures were recorded on to tapes which the secretarial staff in the Institute for Social Research then used as the basis for fair copies. With the exception of his last lecture course in the summer semester 1968, the tapes were wiped, while the transcripts – which Adorno had not vetted – were preserved. Unfortunately, this procedure was followed in the present lecture series only for the first ten lectures, while for lectures 11 to 25 we have only Adorno's notes. It can no longer be established whether the transcripts were mislaid or whether there was some technical fault and the tapes failed to record in the first place. The academic assistants and other staff who were involved either are no longer around or else cannot remember what happened. Since the significance of the lecture course is as a preliminary to Adorno's magnum opus it seemed inappropriate to include it in the posthumous writings (

Nachgelassene Schriften

). It was decided, therefore, to print the transcripts of the tapes of the first ten lectures. For lectures 11 to 25 the edition had to make do with Adorno's own notes. In order to make available to the reader at least in this one instance a complete set of Adorno's own notes, it was decided to print his notes even in the first ten lectures where the transcripts are to hand. Obviously if at some time in the future the missing transcripts, or even a reliable set of notes from among those attending the lectures, were to come to light, it would become necessary to replace the current edition.

LECTURE 19 November 1965The Concept of Contradiction

Notes

Begun on

25 October 651

The special relationship of research and teaching.

The lecture course derived from work in progress.

Plan:

Introduction to the concept of a negative dialectics

Transition to neg[ative] dial[ectics] from a critique of present-day philosophy, especially the ontological approach

Some categories of a negative dialectics.

What is meant by neg[ative] dial[ectics] – the dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. Not the triadic form, too superficial. In particular, the emphasis on the so-called synthesis is absent. Dial[ectics] refers to the fibre of thought, the inner structure, not an architectonic pattern.

Basic conception: structure of contradiction, in a twofold sense:

the contradictory nature of the

concept

, i.e. the concept in contradiction to the thing to which it refers (explain: what is

missing

in the concept and in what respect it is something

more

. Contradiction = discrepancy. But with the emphatic sense of concept this

becomes

contradiction. Contradiction

in

the concept, not merely

between

concepts.[)]

the contradictory character of

reality

: model: antagonistic society. (Explain, life + catastrophe; today society survives by means of what tears it apart.)