Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity

8 Subjectivity and Negative Dialectics

During 1963, Adorno published three monographs on Hegel— “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” and “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”—in a small book titled Hegel:Three Studies. In the Preface to this book, Adorno says that “the work as a whole is intended as a preparation for a revised conception of the dialectic,”1 and in 1966 this revised conception was tendered in Negative Dialectics. Adorno starts Negative Dialectics with a section titled “The Possibility of Philosophy.” “Philosophy,” he begins, “which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. . . . Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization , philosophy is obliged to ruthlessly criticize itself” (ND, p. 3). These words, purposely evocative of Marx’s claim that “you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it,”2 which is itself tied to the fortunes of the working classes (“philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy”3 ), should not be taken to mean that Adorno has effectively split with Hegelian-Marxism by virtue of the fact that “the attempt to change the world miscarried” (ND, p. 3). Indeed, Adorno sees Hegelian-Marxism as the highest achievement of the philosophical tradition, which is why it is nothing less than “philosophy ” itself that must “ruthlessly criticize itself.” The problem in “reopening the case of dialectics,” however, is that its “non-idealistic 237 8 Subjectivity and Negative Dialectics form has since degenerated into dogma as its idealistic one did into a cultural asset”—and, yet, there is no question of going back to “a traditional mode of philosophizing,” which is concerned with “the actuality of the philosophical structure of cognitive concepts,” a form of philosophizing that Hegel’s substantive thinking had rightly seen as “empty and, in an emphatic sense, null and void” (ND, p. 7). Even in the light of this rather scant discussion of the first lines of Negative Dialectics, it should be relatively clear that Adorno is neither a “post-Marxist” nor a “postmodernist” avant la lettre, which Fredric Jameson describes as “the two most influential misreadings of Adorno.”4 The important problem that Adorno does not address— which might, at least in part, provide the grounds for such “misreadings ”—is not whether his negative dialectics is actually breaking with the dialectical tradition (the answer to which is plain enough) but whether his negative dialectics is actually justified notwithstanding the fact that “the attempt to change the world miscarried.” Adorno is quite clear on the fact that “theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on” (ND, p. 3), which suggests that with the passing of the moment there is also a passing of the theory. Thus, the problem, which is reflected in certain variants of postmodernism, is whether there is any concept of philosophy left that has not been completely assimilated by the “totally administered society,” such that philosophy has been abolished by virtue of the very fact that it has ultimately not realized itself. Of course, theory lives on—but the issue is whether it lives on as critical theory. As analytically powerful as it might be, Habermas’s theory of communicative action–cum–theory of deliberative democracy is of a piece with the traditional variety, and so is J. M. Bernstein’s recent reconstruction of Adorno’s negative dialectic itself.5 In any case, while I believe that Adorno could have made good the continuing viability of negative dialectics by making good the argument that the sociohistorical grounds that could support it are still extant (and, indeed, I believe that even now they are still extant), it was incumbent on him to do so. Adorno is well aware of the problem. In “The Possibility of Philosophy ,” he asserts that “critical self-reflection must not halt before the highest peaks of its history [but instead] its task would be to inquire whether and how there can be philosophy at all” (ND, p. 4), and in the very next section, “Dialectics Not a Standpoint,” he admits that “the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared the fate [of assimilation by the market] would surely deteriorate into self-advertis238 SARTRE AND ADORNO ing” (ND, p. 4). Nevertheless, Adorno declares, dialectics need not “be muted by such criticism” because “the name of dialectics says...