ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on key aspects of the lesser known Night Moves and of the later Blade Runner in order to attempt to unravel the dialectical core of the neo-noir constellation. It highlights the elementary discrepancy between Adorno's dialectic and Hegel's dialectic. While Adorno's project in critical theory and negative dialectics is dualistic, Hegel's dialectic affirms the ontological, self-propelling incompleteness of the One, where subject and substance are speculatively identical. The main feature of Adorno's concept of the dialectic emerges from his conviction that there exists a fundamental and inerasable discrepancy between thought's compulsion to identify and the persistence of a material dimension in the object that by definition escapes identification. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner provides us with a precise filmic depiction of the dialectic, for its visionary allure delivers an image of the subject caught in a radically self-alienating loop.
