ND Part II / Logic of Disassembly (Part 2)
Such a dialectics is however no longer compatible with Hegel. Its movement does not tend towards identity in the difference of every object from its concept; rather it suspects something identical in it.
“It suspects something identical in it” is ambiguous. It’s a bad translation of eher beargwöhnt sie Identisches. This unambiguously carries the sense of distrust, so a better translation is as follows:
Such a dialectics is however no longer compatible with Hegel. Its movement does not tend towards identity in the difference of every object from its concept; rather, it regards the identical with suspicion.
So, Adorno’s dialectics does not seek identity where it sees a discrepancy, as Hegel’s does. On the contrary, it is sceptical towards identity and avoids it.
Its logic is one of disassembly [Zerfalls]: [namely, the disassembly] of the prepared and concretized form of concepts, which the cognizing subject immediately faces at first.
(phrase added for clarification)
The logic of negative dialectics is a logic of disassembly, i.e., the logic of the disintegration of the prepared and concretized form of concepts immediately faced by the cognizing subject. This disassembly is not a mere moment on the way to an identity; it’s the terminal condition of things. To establish an identity with concepts is to falsify.
Their identity with the subject is untruth. Through it the subjective pre-formation of the phenomenon slides in front of what is non-identical, before the individuum ineffabile.
Subjective pre-formations such as the demand for a first, or some other conceptual scheme, obscure the real object.
The summation of identical determinations would correspond to the fondest wish of traditional philosophy, to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form, ontology. However, this structure is, before every sort of specific content, in the simplest sense negative as something abstractly maintained, Spirit become compulsion. The power of that negativity rules to this day in reality. What would be different, has not yet begun.
Traditional philosophy would like to have, or to produce, the totality of all identities, of all determinations according to identity-thinking. But the a priori here, in this idealist impulse, is “Spirit become compulsion”. It is abstractly maintained, not derived from the things themselves or from one’s experience of them. In this passage he calls that compulsion negative in the simplest sense. The simplest sense he intends is that of absence or emptiness: the a priori structure is, as abstractly maintained, empty of content—but even in its emptiness it works compulsively, imposing its form on what is given in experience. And this compulsion rules in reality, because identity-thinking and the urge to mastery continue to produce domination and suffering (recall mastery of nature/mastery of men from Lecture 1).
This affects all specific determinations. Each one which appears non-contradictory proves to be as contradictory as the ontological models of being and existence. Nothing positive is to be obtained from philosophy which would be identical with its construction. In the process of demythologization positivity must be negated all the way into the instrumental reason, which demythologization supplies.
This passage outlines the consequences of the foregoing arguments (not only in this section but in previous ones). Another way to put what he is saying is that the Enlightenment must finish the job of demythologization that it started. A residual myth following the Enlightenment’s demythologization was the dominance of instrumental reason; it stopped short of demythologizing instrumental reason itself. That’s what Adorno and Horkheimer did in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and he continues to emphasize its importance here in ND.
But he is not rejecting idealism entirely:
Nevertheless, the critique of idealism does not discard what the construction of the concept towards the insight once garnered, and what the guidance of the concepts once won in terms of energy from the method.
Idealism achieved the insight into the conceptual constitution of the objects of thought, and a methodological driving force, applicable everywhere and deep into the nature of things and their relations.
Only that which is inscribed in the idealistic magic circle goes beyond its figure, by calling it by name in the completion of its own deductive process, demonstrating what is separated from it, what is untrue in it, in the developed summation of the totality.
Adorno wants to go beyond the idealism, but says this can only be done from the inside idealism’s magic circle, using the deductive method to push through, demonstrating that the system is false. What matters is that Adorno doesn’t want to critique idealism (primarily Hegel, here) as a whole and from the outside. Rather, he watches idealism convict itself in the completion of the system, attempting to prove itself as a totality. In idealism’s effort to show that the whole is the true, we see that the whole is the false. We see the remainder, the non-identical, that falsifies the system.
Pure identity is what is set up [Gesetzte: posited] by the subject, and to this extent is brought from outside. To immanently criticize it means therefore, paradoxically enough, to criticize it from outside as well. The subject must render compensation to the non-identical, for what it perpetrated on it.
Remember that “from outside” means from outside the matter-at-hand, not from outside the subject-object relation. But here, this also implies that immanent critique has to take a stand outside the imposed principle of identity, on the side of what that principle excluded.
Precisely this sets it free from the appearance [Schein] of its absolute being-for-itself. This latter for its part is the product of the identifying thought, which, the more it devalues a thing to the mere example of its kind or species, the more it imagines that it has it as such, without subjective addition.
In taking the side of the non-identical—which is also to take the side of the particulars against their conceptual subsumption—the subject frees itself from the appearance of its absolute being-for-itself: the illusion that it, the subject, is self-sufficient, that nothing ultimately stands outside it.