Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (review)

In 1992, New German Critique published a special issue devoted to the work of Theodor W. Adorno in which scholars proposed a critical reassessment of his philosophy. Since its appearance, studies of Adorno's oeuvre have not failed to remark upon his untimeliness: much like philosophy in the wake of Marxism, Adorno lives on as a missed opportunity, an unfulfilled promise. In his introduction to that issue, Peter Hohendahl observes four historical trends in Adorno criticism.¹ In the heyday of New Left social movements which, in Germany especially, held firm to Marxist orthodoxy, Adorno was accused of being a pessimistic anti-revolutionary, resigned to pursuing theory without praxis and eschewing any vision of social transformation. With the advent of poststructuralism, however, Adorno's thought was appropriated in new ways. Because he critiqued idealism, constitutive subjectivity, the hegemony of reason, and history as teleology, Adorno was seen as a proto-deconstructionist in whose negative dialectics an affinity with deconstruction could be detected. Yet Adorno's cultural elitism, his criticism of mass culture, and his defense of the relative autonomy of the aesthetic soon placed him in the cross-hairs of postmodernists, who identified him as a mandarin cultural critic yearning nostalgically for a return to nineteenth-century bourgeois high culture. According to Hohendahl, "authentic" Adorno criticism, thus far sorely lacking, only began emerging in the early 1990s. Its aims were to re-read Adorno's oeuvre in light of recent English translations, to release it from its embrace by poststructuralist and postmodernist critique, and, most importantly, to discredit the view that had developed in second-generation critical theory—most notably, Jurgen Habermas's—that Adorno had sworn off the Enlightenment by disowning reason.

Habermas's view notwithstanding, Robert Hullot-Kentor regards Adorno as a bona fide Enlightenment philosopher whose life project was a "critique of reason by way of reason" (13).² Among those who have pursued a return to Adorno, the crucial question is: What sort of Enlightenment philosopher is he? For Hullot-Kentor, Gillian Rose, and Simon Jarvis, Adorno is an aporetic philosopher of the Transcendental Dialectic and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method. Responding to the moment of nonidentity, and reflecting upon the damaging, but necessary moment of identity thinking, reason must be double: it must turn back on itself in auto-critique at the same time that it succumbs to the metaphysical or speculative impulse to think utopia. This line of argument amounts to a defense of the unity of reason. In his recent work, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Brian O'Connor elaborates an alternative understanding, one that emphasizes the duality of reason. Presupposing a split between the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements and the Transcendental Dialectic, O'Connor distinguishes between transcen-dental philosophy and transcendental illusion, between truth and critique. Staking out a new interpretation of Adorno, O'Connor maintains that in his epistemological works, Adorno is concerned with deducing the conditions of possibility for a fully lived experience. Against those who commonly claim that negative dialectics is nothing other than negative theology or pure insight with no content of its own, O'Connor argues that out of Adorno's Against Epistemology: A Metacritique and Negative Dialectics one can reconstruct a theory of experience.

O'Connor's project is significant because it represents an apology for philosophy and a defense of how one should live. His first thesis, evident in the subtitle of his book, is that philosophy is equivalent to critical rationality and that critical rationality is synonymous with full, unreduced experience. His second thesis, no less striking, is that critical rationality is the ground of social theory, or in O'Connor's terms, it is a "theoretical foundation of the sort of reflexivity—the critical stance—required by critical theory" (ix). Adorno's theory of experience is relevant, O'Connor proposes, not because it satisfies some antiquarian need to unearth the "real" Adorno, but because it carries the renewed possibility of critical theory today.

In...