#negative dialectics

[theshatterednotes]

Theodor W. Adorno

[thelonguepuree]

“Art is no more than theory able to concretize utopia, not even negatively. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia.”

— Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

[philosophybits]

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject...

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

[athousandgateaux]

“[For philosophers after Nietzsche, nihilism represented] the epitome of a condition that was accused, or was accusing itself, of being null and void. For thinking habits that consider nihilism bad in any case, this condition is waiting to be injected with meaning, no matter whether the critique of the meaning, the critique attributed to nihilism, is well-founded or unfounded. Though noncommittal, such talk of nihilism lends itself to demagoguery; but it knocks down a straw man it put up itself…The indignation at nihilism that has today been turned on again is hardly aimed at mysticism, which finds the negated something even in nothingness, in the nihil privativum, and which enters into the dialectics unleashed by the word nothingness itself. The more likely point, therefore, is simply moral defamation—by mobilizing a word generally loathed and incompatible with universal good cheer—of the man who refuses to accept the Western legacy of positivity and to subscribe to any meaning of things as they exist…The true nihilists are the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the ones who are thus conspiring with all extant malice, and eventually with the destructive principle itself. Thought honors itself by defending what is damned as nihilism.

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pg. 379-381

[anthropofugal]

Freedom follows the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed.

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

[thelonguepuree]

To identify culture solely with lies is more fateful than ever, now that the former is really becoming totally absorbed by the latter, and eagerly invites such identification in order to compromise every opposing thought. If material reality is called the world of exchange value, and culture whatever refuses to accept the domination of that world, then it is true that such refusal is illusory as long as the existent exists. Since, however, free and honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the same time to speak for truth: in face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective. That culture so far has failed is no justification for furthering its failure, by strewing the store of good flour on the spilt beer like the girl in the fairy-tale. People who belong together ought neither to keep silent about their material interests, not to sink to their level, but to assimilate them by reflection into their relationships and so surpass them.

- Adorno, Minima Moralia (trans. Jephcott)

[gastronomickleptomaniac]

Dialectics need not be rejected by the rebuke that it is a method pasted externally onto objects. Dialectics say no more than that objects do not go into concepts without leaving a remainder. Objects are the primacy of dialectics, without being postulated as absolute, objects are in relation with concepts, differentiated from concepts by concepts, under the rule of a law that is applicable to non-identity as well.

[itsmightyfunny]

Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [Widervernunft] …Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance…from nonsemblance [vom Scheinlosen] … . No light falls on people and things in which transcendence would not appear [widerschiene]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world's colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised.