ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore how Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics are unique and valuable as an interpretive approach for practices in political theory. In contrast to the speculative, or Hegelian, type of dialectics, negative dialectics refer to an ironic reversal in which the end movement can result in regression rather than progression. Negative dialectics draws attention to the way that the dialectical movement of history often produces the exact evils Enlightenment progress had originally sought to remedy.2 As a tool of analysis, negative dialectics looks for contradictions within a text as well as how those contradictions can be utilized to critique contemporary politics.3 For Adorno, negative dialectics is the truest manifestation of dialectical thinking and forms the philosophical backbone of Critical Theory.4 As an approach to interpreting political texts it is at the same time a critique of political texts. More specifically, this technique involves an examination of the internal contradictions that appear in any argument. These contradictions exist when objects are described as though there were no distance between the object a thinker is attempting to describe and the terminology used to describe it. There is always incompleteness in language, and negative dialectical interpretation aims to highlight the most problematic instances of this inherent incompleteness-especially those that open the door towards fascist modes of thought, one of the key ethical concerns of Adorno’s negative dialectics and of the Frankfurt School more broadly. Negative dialectical interpretation, like other forms of interpretation, is a social practice-that is to say, it is an activity that can
never be separated from its social and historical circumstances and goes so far as to engage directly with those circumstances through its interpretive procedures.5 Its central tenet is that concepts are always incomplete. More specifically, they are always non-identical with what they are meant to include.6 Thus, negative dialectics offers a technique that justifies how and why we need to be diligently suspicious of all texts’ claims or intimations of completeness; it assists us in analyzing the arguments of a text as well as critiquing existing social conditions. Negative dialectical interpretation is always experimental and inconclusive, but
this is far from suggesting that it is not a productive approach to interpreting texts in political theory.7 Though Adorno did not develop negative dialectics specifically as a way to read texts in political theory, it can be used in precisely this manner to gain a critical understanding of the ways in which traditional political theories can be re-read to speak more productively to contemporary society. Theodor W. Adorno is one of the central figures in the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory. While working on his dissertation on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Adorno met his longtime friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer. This friendship with Horkheimer led to Adorno’s connection with and membership in the then recently founded neo-Marxist Institute for Social Research. Through his early interactions with the Institute’s associates, including Ernst Bloch, Leo Löwenthal, and Walter Benjamin, Adorno developed the original and recondite brand of dialectical thought so closely associated with his name today.8
