Continental Philosophy

Negative Dialectics

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Theodor Adorno

1966

Negative Dialectics is Adorno's magnum opus — the most sustained and rigorous articulation of his philosophical programme and one of the most demanding works in the tradition of Western Marxism. The book's central target is what Adorno calls "identity thinking": the tendency of conceptual thought to forcibly subsume particulars under universal categories, reducing the qualitative richness and non-identicalness of objects to their role within a system. Against Hegel's positive dialectics — in which contradictions are resolved and aufgehoben into higher unities — Adorno defends a "negative" dialectics that refuses resolution, insisting on the permanent gap between concept and object, the remainder that always escapes identification. The book moves from a methodological introduction through a critique of Heidegger's fundamental ontology, a model analysis of Kant's moral philosophy, and finally to "Meditations on Metaphysics" — a sustained confrontation with the possibility of thinking after Auschwitz.