ABSTRACT
The following two chapters will focus on dialectical attempts at rethinking and practising negativity in light of the criticisms and possibilities already discussed.1 Merleau-Ponty and Adorno, who were almost exact contemporaries, were both eager to rescue dialectics as a critical enterprise liberated from rationalism and positivism. They interpreted this challenge in terms of further exploring negativity. In some ways their discourses already prefigure poststructuralism. Negativity emerges in their work as ineliminable difference or non-identity, its generativity witnessed in the creation and destruction of positive forms. They anticipate the distaste for totality and teleology, absolute knowledge or the end of history, with which dialectics would be dismissed by their successors. Like them, they refer to pluralities and multiple tensions rather than using a more binary language of contradiction and negation. But Merleau-Ponty and Adorno also remained materialists who felt compelled to approach the negative from the perspective of meaning in history and a radical politics oriented to broadly humanist concerns. If positive appearances of power and knowledge now emerged contingently, without guarantees and menaced by ambiguity and dissonance, they still called for both critical interpretation and the sort of changes that could only be wrought by material forces which had somehow to be identified within the reified totality of late modernity.
