What remains: Adorno's genuine achievement and its limits
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What must be preserved
It would be a mistake to treat Adorno as a mere error. His philosophy contains genuine insights untouched by the critique of his basic presuppositions.
The first insight is sensitivity to the particular. Adorno’s analyses of the culture industry, of the authoritarian character, of the sociology of music are strongest where they convey concrete knowledge about concrete mechanisms — where they show how standardization functions, how pseudo-individualization replaces individuality, how the commodity form penetrates aesthetic production. These analyses survive the critique of “Negative Dialectics,” because they do not depend on its presuppositions; they function as materialist-sociological analyses, not as illustrations of a negative ontology.
The second insight is vigilance against premature reconciliation. Adorno’s insistence that negativity must not be talked away, that suffering must not be harmonized, that the experience of Auschwitz must not be “sublated” in some greater sense — this insistence is philosophically and humanly legitimate. The question is only whether it follows that every reconciliation is premature, that every sublation is repression, that every positive determination is ideology. Adorno’s error is the universalization of a legitimate warning.
The third insight is self-reflexivity. Adorno belongs to the few philosophers of the twentieth century who consistently tried to apply their own method to themselves — to reflect on their own entanglement, to interrogate their own presuppositions, to expose their own position to the same suspicion to which they expose everything else. This self-reflexivity is a genuine merit, even though in Adorno’s case it frequently degenerates into immunization against criticism (in that every objection is interpreted as confirmation of the naivety being criticized).
What must be overcome
Overcoming Adorno concerns not the insights but the presuppositions that turn these insights into an aporia.
The first presupposition that must be overcome is the Nietzschean equation of concept-formation with domination. Not every act of identifying is violence. Even recognizing oppression is an identifying act — whoever says “this is oppression” has identified, subsumed, determined. The critique of domination presupposes the capacity to identify that it suspects of being domination-shaped. A philosophy that fundamentally distrusts thought cannot explain why one should trust its own thinking.
The second presupposition that must be overcome is the Heideggerian equation of determination with missing the thing. Not every concept misses the thing. Even pointing to the “non-identical” is a conceptual act — whoever says “there is a non-identical” has identified it, determined it, drawn it into the concept. The alternative is not: either violent subsumption or silent circling. The alternative is: better concepts, more adequate to their object — and this presupposes that concept-formation as such does not miss the thing but is on the way toward it.
The third presupposition that must be overcome is the distorted image of Hegelian logic. In Hegel, identity is not equalization, but the restoration of unity out of difference. Contradiction is not the last word, but the motor of development. The universal does not subsume the individual but realizes itself through it. Determinate negation is not “positivity” in the sense of affirming what exists, but the movement that preserves and overcomes what is negated. Whoever restores these Hegelian insights gains exactly the philosophical resources that Adorno seeks but does not find: a thinking that does justice to the particular without abandoning universality; that takes contradiction seriously without absolutizing it; that is critical without being hopeless.
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