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Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
Theodor Adorno 1966
Negative Dialectics
Translation : © 2001 by Dennis Redmond;
Original German : © 1997 by Suhrkamp Verlag;
CopyLeft : translation used with permission,
Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike);
Transcribed : by Andy Blunden .
Translators Notes : Adorno’s astonishing masterwork is truly the Capital of the 21st
century, the first theoretical document to set micropolitics in motion towards global
geopolitics. I created this new version of Adorno’s classic text because the existing
Ashton translation was riddled with so many basic translating errors as to be virtually
unusable in a classroom setting. My new version is far from perfect, but at least gets
the philosophical terms right, and hopefully captures a bit more of the incomparable
power and beauty of Adorno’s original prose. Feel free to quote, cite or otherwise use
this translation; just be sure to cite http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html as the
source.
For those of you who are wondering if a print version is available: this text can only
exist on the Internet, as a freeware or copyleft translation. The reason is that the
University of Minnesota has the sole rights to publish the English-language translation
of Negative Dialectics , and Bob Hullot-Kentor, an extraordinarily gifted translator, is
working on a new version, which will, when it comes out, supersede my own version
(he's a far better translator than I’ll ever be). Since it’ll take some time for Bob to finish
his version, though, my own rough-and-ready version will have to do for the time
being.
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Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
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Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
Theodor Adorno
Negative Dialectics
Prologue
The formulation “negative dialectics” transgresses against tradition. Already in Plato
dialectics intended to establish something positive through the thought-means of the
negation; the figure of a negation of the negation named this precisely. The book
would like to emancipate dialectics from these types of affirmative essence, without
relinquishing anything in terms of determinacy. The development of its paradoxical
title is one of its intentions.
What in accordance with the conception of philosophy would be the foundation, the
author develops only after a great deal of explication of what that conception
presumes would be raised on a foundation. This implies the critique of the concept of
the foundation, as well as of the primacy of substantive thought. Its self-
consciousness achieves its movement solely in its consummation. It requires what,
according to the ground rules of the Spirit which always remain in effect, is
secondary.
What is given herein is not solely a methodology of material labor of the author;
according to the theory of negative dialectics, no continuum exists between the
former and the latter. However such a discontinuity, and what instructions may be
read out of it for thinking, will indeed be dealt with. The procedure is not grounded,
but justified. The author lays, so far as he can, his cards on the table; this is by no
means the same thing as the game.
When Benjamin in 1937 read the part of the Metacritique of Epistemology which the
author had finished at that time – the last chapter of the published work – he
commented, one had to journey through the icy wasteland of abstraction in order to
definitively arrive at concrete philosophizing. Negative dialectics now indicates such
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Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
a path, retrospectively. Concretion was for the most part smuggled into contemporary
philosophy. By contrast the largely abstract text wishes to vouch for its authenticity
no less than for the explanation of the author’s concrete mode of procedure. If one
speaks in the newest aesthetic debates of anti-drama and anti-heroes, then Negative
Dialectics , which holds itself distant from all aesthetic themes, could be called an anti-
system. With logically consistent means, it attempts to put, in place of the principle of
unity and of the hegemony of the supra-ordinated concept, that which would be
outside of the bane of such unity. Since the author has trusted himself to follow his
own intellectual impulses, he felt it to be his task to break through the delusion of
constitutive subjectivity by means of the power of the subject; he no longer wished to
put off this task. To reach stringently across the official division of pure philosophy
and what is relevant to the matter [ Sachhaltigem ] or what is formally scientific, was
one of the determining motives therein.
The introduction expounds the concept of philosophical experience. The first section
starts out from the state of the ontology which dominates today in Germany. It is not
judged from above, but is comprehended out of its need, which is no less problematic
for its part, and criticized immanently. The second section proceeds from the results
to the idea of a negative dialectics and its position in relation to several categories,
which it preserves as well as qualitatively transforms. The third section then carries
out models of negative dialectics. They are not examples; they do not simply
illuminate general considerations. By leading towards what is relevant to the matter,
they would like to simultaneously do justice to the substantive intention of what is at
first dealt with generally, out of necessity, in contrast to the usage of examples as
something indifferent in themselves, which Plato introduced and which philosophy
has ever since merely repeated. While the models are supposed to clarify what
negative dialectics would be, and to drive this latter, according to its own concept,
into the realm of reality, they elucidate, not dissimilar to the so-called exemplary
models, key concepts of philosophical disciplines, in order to centrally intervene in
these. A dialectics of freedom will do this for the philosophy of ethics; “World-Spirit
and Natural History” for that of history; the last chapter circles, feeling its way,
around metaphysical questions, in the sense of the axial revolution of the Copernican
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Frankfurt School: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno 1966
turn, by means of critical self-reflection.
Ulrich Sonneman is working on a book which is supposed to be entitled Negative
Anthropology . Neither he nor the author knew beforehand about the coincidence. It
refers to a compulsion in the thing itself.
The author is prepared for the resistance, which Negative Dialectics will provoke.
Without rancor, he does not begrudge the joy of all those, both hither and yonder [i.e.
on both sides of the Berlin Wall], who will proclaim that they had always said it and
now the author would be confessing it.
Frankfurt, Summer 1966
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