ABSTRACT
In Theodor W. Adorno Adorno's philosophy, the spellbound subjects reproduce a totality. Adorno explains the existence of the totality not in terms of contingency but in terms of social necessity. Gordon Finlayson maintains that non-identity in Adorno 'can be construed as the figure of something wholly beyond reason and completely other to discursive thought, and hence ineffable the non-identical has to be radically other than the totally administered social world'. Deborah Cook, focused on Adorno's materialism, reads Adorno's references to objects in Negative Dialectics not so much in terms of the process of social objectivity that lies in the objectified labour produced by people themselves. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno expands on the meaning of dialectics in terms of the 'contradiction once experienced in the thing'. The object, the thing, is the form that our doing takes in capitalism. The only purpose of a critical theorist is to make us aware of the antinomies inherent in our schizophrenic way of living in capitalism.
