Adorno's negative philosophical method

To the isolated, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are bewitched on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how mediated their isolation is'-Adorno-Theodor Adorno was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Negative Dialectics is his major and culminating work. In it he attempts to free critical thought from the blinding orthodoxies of late capitalism, and earlier ages too. The book is essential reading for students of Adorno. It is also a vital weapon for making sense of modern times. ISBN 0-203-47960-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-47991-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05221-1 (Print Edition)

This article elaborates Theodor W. Adorno’s understanding of ‘negation’ and ‘negative theology.’ It proceeds by introducing a typology of negation within modern philosophy roughly from Descartes onwards, showing how Adorno both fits and also stands out in this typology. Ultimately, it is argued that Adorno’s approach to negation and thereby to negative theology is throughout distinguished and infused by an ethical commitment.

To the isolated, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are bewitched on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how mediated their isolation is'-Adorno-Theodor Adorno was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Negative Dialectics is his major and culminating work. In it he attempts to free critical thought from the blinding orthodoxies of late capitalism, and earlier ages too. The book is essential reading for students of Adorno. It is also a vital weapon for making sense of modern times. ISBN 0-203-47960-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-47991-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-05221-1 (Print Edition)

Theor Soc, 1975

Modernism/modernity, 2003

One of the big questions Adorno's work raises concerns the normative and evaluative ground of his ethical writings and of his social theory. 1 In the major works of his mature philosophy-Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory-Adorno criticizes the elements of social life that threaten the autonomy of the individual and that encourage individuals to adopt instrumental relations to other people and things. 2 Adorno's criticisms are unambiguously normative. In Negative Dialectics, he describes his theory as "the ontology of the false state of things" and adds that "a right state of things would be free from dialectics: just as little a system as a contradiction." 3 The rather puzzling counterposition of the attributes "false" and "right" betrays his underlying normative concern. Adorno has an emphatic conception of truth/ falsity that is both Platonic and Hegelian. Insofar as he conceives truth as an aspect of the good, or rather the converse, untruth as an aspect of the bad, Adorno is a follower of Plato. Insofar as his conception of untruth "aims at bad actuality," i.e., insofar as he maintains that untruth or falsity is embodied in the social world, Adorno follows Hegel. 4 When Adorno claims that philosophy responds to a "world that is false to its innermost reaches," he means that it responds to a corrupt or bad world, to a world that ought not to be as it is (ND, 41 [31]). That said, Negative Dialectics is not a work of normative ethical theory, and Adorno's ethical concerns are atypical. He makes no attempt to answer the central questions of normative ethics such as "What is goodness?" "How should one live?" "What ought I to do?" etc. Even when writing about Kant's practical philoso

New Formations, 2005

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2012

Adorno's social theory dissolves the dogmatic posture of reified things. Its critical intention is to decipher the human social practice hidden in things. For Adorno, the social practice that counts is the one that fights barbarism, and for this fight to succeed, it has to tackle the social preconditions that make barbarism possible. A social practice that fails to do just that partakes in the false world of bourgeois society that it ostensibly seeks to overcome. In this context, Adorno argues, on the one hand, that the fight against barbarism is impossible because every social practice is the same. On the other, he says that negation is the only alternative to the falsehood of bourgeois society. The essay explores Adorno's Negative Dialectics to examine this paradox and to decipher its conception of social practice in a reified world. What does it mean to say 'no'?

A Companion To Adorno (ed. Peter Gordon and Espen Hammer), 2020

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno’s theory of “non-identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought.

Marx and Philosphy Review of Books, 2019

Review of Eric Oberle's book 'Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity', Stanford University Press, 2019.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2024

Adorno’s philosophy was long overshadowed by the accusation that it is too negative, before defences of his negativist stance have contributed to its revival in the last two decades. Peter Gordon, in his newest book, seeks to intervene in this context by rejecting negativistic readings and painting Adorno instead as someone who accepts that precarious happiness exists in the current wrong social world, which, in turn, gives us a glimpse of comprehensive happiness to come and is the source for his immanent social critique of that world. In this Review Article, I critically discuss Gordon’s rejection of negativism. I suggest that there is a danger of conflating negativism with other views that are distinct from it, and that such misinterpretations are, unfortunately, at the heart of Gordon’s book. I also identify an important challenge to negativism, and sketch how it might be addressed. I conclude that there is no need to appeal to anything positive—be it communicative action or even precarious happiness. Instead, we should embrace the freedom of thought to negate all.