Ethics at a Standstill: History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School

Four. Negative Dialectics and Ethics

169 FOUR Negative Dialectics and Ethics The Same, Critique, and Dialectics Adorno begins Negative Dialectics with the arresting claim that “philosophy...lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (ND, 3). Much too easily this can be taken to imply that Adorno intends somehow to either restore philosophy to its traditional functions of grounding and synthesizing a comprehensive knowledge, à la Hegel, perhaps with a new degree of modesty about reason’s limits, à la Kant, or that he has in mind some future historical realization of its past aims, à la the young Marx. None of these are at all the case. If he promises anything, it is a “changed philosophy” (13) whose promise is not to formulate goals to be realized by the thinker or as universal history. Philosophy cannot be realized as cognition of the totality coming to itself or as the translation of this into the agency of the proletariat as a unified subject-object bringing about the end of prehistory. One can perhaps succeed or fail at negative dialectics, but negative dialectics itself can neither fail nor succeed in the purposive achievement of a positive end. To look at Negative Dialectics as an attempt at a new version of objective reason is to misunderstand radically what is taking place in it. If there is an analogous — but merely analogous — precedent 170 Ethics at a Standstill for this project, Adorno finds it himself in Kant’s search for the possibility of metaphysics after his own critique of rationalism made metaphysics impossible. The changed philosophy has as its animating question the problem of how any philosophy at all is possible now that Hegel’s has fallen because the latter failed “to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts” (4). There are for philosophy only three possible extant choices: either it is to be simply the methodology of the special sciences, as positivism would have it; or in its search for substantiality it is to revert in one form or another to Hegel’s bad identitarianism; or, finally, it may, from within the idealistically formulated notion of dialectics use “experiences contrary to the Hegelian emphasis” on the primacy of the subject for “re-opening the case of dialectics” (7–8).1 Thus for Adorno, “the critical path is the only one still open,”2 and “philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself ” (ND, 3). Negative dialectics, then, will be critique. But, after Hegel, it will have “regained the right to think substantively instead of being put off with the analysis of cognitive forms that were empty and, in an emphatic sense, null and void” (7). Thinking substantively, here, will not mean, however, identifying the substance it thinks. It will mean instead “full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection” (13). And this unreduced experience will be “the world agony raised to a concept” (6). Where idealist dialectics was inherently tied, as its exposition, to a historico-teleological eschatology, negative dialectics is analogously tied to natural history as the necessary but insufficient precondition for an escape from that natural history. The teleo-eschatological construal of history is, on the other hand, only one of the symptoms of a history that is still natural-historical. The dialectical critique that Adorno develops, which is more and less than a methodology and metatheory for a critical human science, which is in fact its philosophical subordination to the Negative Dialectics and Ethics 171 possibility of a transcendence of natural history, can, according to him “only be achieved negatively. Dialectics unfolds the difference between the particular and the universal, dictated by the universal” (ND, 6). Negation is inescapable: “Thought as such, before all contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labour and material” (19). What Adorno borrows above all from Hegel is the moment of negativity, the “sense of negativity of the dialectical logic he is expounding” as exemplified in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Mind (156) but now relieved of the systematics of identity. The transcendence of the natural-historical reduction of experience by a different species of thinking will depend entirely on the negativity still contained even within such reduced experience, albeit tacitly. Thus, Adorno does not conceive of negative dialectics as a program of knowledge, at least nothing...