Determinados livros, de fato, já nascem clássicos. É certo que, hoje, as deficiências no processo de formação têm levado as novas gerações a sequer tomarem conhecimento dos clássicos. E, como consequência, as distorções em torno de categorias do pensamento social abundam - aliás, por vezes, elas são confundidas até mesmo com expressões do senso comum. Uma miséria de pensamento, pode-se dizer, estabelecendo-se aqui um paralelo com a filosofia política marxiana, quando Marx cunhou o 'miséria da filosofia' como resposta a Proudhon. Pois bem, o livro A Dialética Negativa, de Adorno, caminhando para os seus 50 anos, é uma dessas obras que já nasceram clássicas. Livro central no âmbito da Escola de Frankfurt, sua influência atravessa o percurso histórico desta - dos seus fundadores, passando por Habermas e Axel Honnet. E a Dialética Negativa inspirou outros escritos, como o Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, de Brian O'Connor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Reproduzo, a seguir, uma recensão deste.
Andrew J. Taggart
University of Wisconsin-Madison
In 1992, New German Critique published a special issue devoted to the work of Theodor W. Adorno in which scholars proposed a critical reassessment of his philosophy. Since its appearance, studies of Adorno's oeuvre have not failed to remark upon his untimeliness: much like philosophy in the wake of Marxism, Adorno lives on as a missed opportunity, an unfulfilled promise. In his introduction to that issue, Peter Hohendahl observes four historical trends in Adorno criticism.1 In the heyday of New Left social movements which, in Germany especially, held firm to Marxist orthodoxy, Adorno was accused of being a pessimistic anti-revolutionary, resigned to pursuing theory without praxis and eschewing any vision of social transformation. With the advent of poststructuralism, however, Adorno's thought was appropriated in new ways. Because he critiqued idealism, constitutive subjectivity, the hegemony of reason, and history as teleology, Adorno was seen as a proto-deconstructionist in whose negative dialectics an affinity with deconstruction could be detected. Yet Adorno's cultural elitism, his criticism of mass culture, and his defense of the relative autonomy of the aesthetic soon placed him in the cross-hairs of postmodernists, who identified him as a mandarin cultural critic yearning nostalgically for a return to nineteenth-century bourgeois high culture. According to Hohendahl, "authentic" Adorno criticism, thus far sorely lacking, only began emerging in the early 1990s. Its aims were to re-read Adorno's oeuvre in light of recent English translations, to release it from its embrace by poststructuralist and postmodernist critique, and, most importantly, to discredit the view that had developed in second-generation critical theory—most notably, Jurgen Habermas's—that Adorno had sworn off the Enlightenment by disowning reason.
Habermas's view notwithstanding, Robert Hullot-Kentor regards Adorno as a bona fide Enlightenment philosopher whose life project was a "critique of reason by way of reason" (13).2 Among those who have pursued a return to Adorno, the crucial question is: What sort of Enlightenment philosopher is he? For Hullot-Kentor, Gillian Rose, and Simon Jarvis, Adorno is an aporetic philosopher of the Transcendental Dialectic and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method. Responding to the moment of nonidentity, and reflecting upon the damaging, but necessary moment of identity thinking, reason must be double: it must turn back on itself in auto-critique at the same time that it succumbs to the metaphysical or speculative impulse to think utopia. This line of [End Page 172] argument amounts to a defense of the unity of reason. In his recent work, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Brian O'Connor elaborates an alternative understanding, one that emphasizes the duality of reason. Presupposing a split between the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements and the Transcendental Dialectic, O'Connor distinguishes between transcen-dental philosophy and transcendental illusion, between truth and critique. Staking out a new interpretation of Adorno, O'Connor maintains that in his epistemological works, Adorno is concerned with deducing the conditions of possibility for a fully lived experience. Against those who commonly claim that negative dialectics is nothing other than negative theology or pure insight with no content of its own, O'Connor argues that out of Adorno's Against Epistemology: A Metacritique and Negative Dialectics one can reconstruct a theory of experience.
O'Connor's project is significant because it represents an apology for philosophy and a defense of how one should live. His first thesis, evident in the subtitle of his book, is that philosophy is equivalent to critical rationality and that critical rationality is synonymous with full, unreduced experience. His second thesis, no less striking, is that critical rationality is the ground of social theory, or in O'Connor's terms, it is a "theoretical foundation of the sort of reflexivity—the critical stance—required by critical theory" (ix). Adorno's theory of experience is relevant, O'Connor proposes, not because it satisfies some antiquarian need to unearth the "real" Adorno, but because it carries the renewed possibility of critical theory today.
In his chapter on Kant, O'Connor takes on a central question of philosophy, that of determining just "what kind of Kantian or Hegelian" (101) Adorno is. Adorno's theory of subject-object mediation is Kantian in its problematic and procedure, yet it is Hegelian in substance. Adorno drew from Kant in formulating questions regarding experience, its limits, and the incoherence that results from attempts to transcend experience, while his reflection on the content of experience, most notably that pertaining to the dynamic interaction of subject and object, owes much to Hegel. In what I would argue is his third thesis, O'Connor posits that Adorno's understanding of experience is not simply one plausible theory among many. Since Adorno advances a normative theory of truth whose standard is rationality, only his negative dialectic is entirely consistent. In keeping with this thesis, Adorno's Negative Dialectic is organized into a neat typology addressing issues of deformation, truth, and critique. The introduction outlines the deformation of reified experience and sets the agenda for any future philosophy. Chapters one to three offer a robust account of truth focusing chiefly on the subject-object mediation and its [End Page 173] most salient feature, the priority assigned to the object. Chapters four and five become exercises in what O'Connor calls Adorno's "transcendental strategy." Here, O'Connor's assesses Adorno's critique of the internal incoherence of Kant's idealism, of Husserl's absolute objectivism, and of Heidegger's irrationalism.
In his introductory comments, O'Connor shows what a profound influence the young Georg Lukacs had on Adorno. The author of History and Class Consciousnessdid not convince him, however, that the proletariat was the subject of history. He could not subscribe to Lukacs's notion that a certain form of rationality is coeval with a society's self-understanding, a premise that led the latter to an analysis of the deformation of social life through reification. O'Connor glosses Lukacsian reification as a debilitating separation of subject and object. "Objectively, the world appears to be governed naturally by these reifying laws," by an overriding and unchangeable givenness. "Subjectively, the individual is deformed by reification to the extent that she now perceives her proper activities in terms of a society governed by quantitative laws (9, O'Connor's emphasis). Here we discern something akin to the Marxian analysis of fetishism, where quality is everywhere replaced by quantity and where all forms of activity merely redouble the status quo. According to O'Connor, Lukacs and Adorno part ways not in the diagnosis of the central social ill of our times, which they both identify as the "crisis of rationality in modernity" (12), but in positing its cure. For Adorno, reification deforms subjective experience. As such, a higher form of rationality must be constituted in order to overcome the afflictions engendered by the social world's attenuated rationality, essentially a form of irrationalism (55-56) that ravages human experience.
Any program for a philosophy that is genuinely and acutely responsive to the scourges of a reified social world would need to avoid the errors visible in much of contemporary philosophy. O'Connor interprets Adorno's inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," as a work that sets the agenda for a philosophy that would become fully mature some twenty or thirty years later. Here Adorno problematizes fundamental ontology's reduction of the object to the structures of Dasein, neo-Kantianism's overt formalism, irrationalism's desire for sensuous immediacy and mystical experience, and positivism's scientific proceduralism, which fails to give the object its due and which cannot reflect on itself. While, in Adorno's eyes, Heideggerian existential phenomenology and neo-Kantianism overestimate the powers of constitutive subjectivity and underestimate the role of the object in determining experience, in bracketing the subject, paradoxically, both [End Page 174] irrationalism and positivism let objectivity slip through their fingers. For Adorno, subject and object must be reconciled.
Throughout Adorno's Negative Dialectic, O'Connor's guiding presupposition is that such reconciliation is only possible through a principle of moderation. Grant too much subjectivity, and one lands in idealism and reification; too much objectivity, and one falls upon immediacy and yields to the status quo. In his first three chapters, O'Connor reconstructs Adorno's theory of subject-object mediation by working through Kant and Hegel, playing the former off the latter. Kant's influence on Adorno is apparent in two ways. First, O'Connor shows, the purpose of Kant's transcendental idealism is to surmount a) empiricism, which assumes the passive reception of objects, and b) rationalism, which asserts that subjective activity wholly constitutes the natural world. It does so by holding a) that the mind has two faculties, sensibility and understanding, which participate in knowledge claims, and b) that the natural world is not reducible to our apprehension of it. In this manner, Kant makes room for materialism and for the priority of the object. Because he posits the existence of noumena, O'Connor holds that "the activity of the subject is circumscribed by the determinate independence of the object" (20). Second, Adorno develops a transcendental strategy of immanent critique from Kant's antinomial logic. In O'Connor's reading, every position but Adorno's — Kant's, Hegel's, Husserl's, and Heidegger's—falls victim to irresolvable inconsistencies.
By foregrounding the need for what he calls Hegel's "conceptual adjustments" (17), O'Connor makes clear the extent to which Hegel's phenomenology has also deeply impacted Adorno's thought. O'Connor maintains that the "ongoing interaction" (29) between subject and object, the conceptual nature of the subject's encounter with objects, and the "particular and irreducible role of subjectivity" (29) are the notions most central to Adorno's philosophy. In particular, Hegel's theory of judgment, gleaned primarily from the introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit, involves a dynamic notion of experience as a total transformation of the horizon of one's understanding. O'Connor explains: "If my concept fails to agree with its object, and is inadequate to judgment, then the concept must be revised…. Altering knowledge, as Hegel puts it, means adjusting the concepts by which we judge the object" (36). It is in this sense that there is an immanent combustion—that is, an experience—when judgment cannot predicate an object. Nonidentity in Adorno thus owes its existence to the Kantian noumenon, and its awareness to Hegelian reflection. [End Page 175]
The shape of O'Connor's reconstruction of Adorno's notion of experience should now be coming into view. In chapter two, which focuses on the priority of the object, O'Connor attempts to effect a reversal—but not a complete abandonment—of idealism in Adorno's thought. How, asks O'Connor, can Adorno maintain the activity and agency of critical subjectivity without liquidating the singularity of the object? O'Connor's move is to illustrate that there is a qualitative difference between subject and object: the object is independent of the subject, but the subject is dependent upon the object. For the object being what there is, the subject only exists so long as she interacts with the "what." Yet the object's independence is only relative since it initially appears to us as that which is subsumable under a concept. Nevertheless, the nonconceptual moment of the object comes on the scene as that which is irreducible to conceptualization—that is, as surprising, wholly unpredictable, and often shocking events. If, however, the object (relatively independent, conceptually grasped, and nonconceptually felt) and the subject (dependent, judgmental, and unwound) are two poles of experience, then for O'Connor, they cannot be hypostasized. On the contrary, the structure of experience is the structure of their mediation, that is, their relative, mutually interacting separate-but-togetherness.
Though the scope of subjectivity has just been greatly curtailed, in chapter three the critical potentiality of subjectivity has been retained. While the mind may no longer be identical to the transcendental unity of apperception, O'Connor shows that, for Adorno, "there is an irreducibly active role for the subject in experience" (72). In a dramatic turn, however, O'Connor claims that Adorno endorses subject determinacy: it is not simply the case that the object is independent of the subject, even that the post-Cartesian subject is dependent upon the object, but that the object determines the subject. But subject determinacy does not lead Adorno to abandon his concept of the subject, but rather to broaden it: his "material subject" (81) responds to his surroundings, is integrated back into nature, and has somatic experiences that are not states of mind, but sensations "within the structure of the subject-object relation" (90, O'Connor's emphasis). Within the structure of experience, the Adornian subject is neither dirempted from nature, nor master of inner and outer nature.
O'Connor's provocative claim that Adorno is a transcendental philosopher is not the only topic of interest in this book; his discussions of Adorno's critical strategies in the latter half of the book will also be of considerable interest to those who are committed to an Adorno who submits all claims to rational standards. For Adorno, Hegel and Kant [End Page 176] amplify an already inflated idealism: neither Hegel's conceptualist orientation nor Kant's removal of the subject from the subject-object relation can provide a serviceable materialism. Whereas Hegel and Kant sacrifice the object in order to salvage a critical subject, Husserl and Heidegger suffer the opposite fate. Elucidating Adorno's metacritical strategy, which challenges any stance that claims to detach genesis completely from validity, O'Connor shows how Husserl's elimination of the subject results in an untenable objectivity. What's worse, Heidegger's transcendental phenomenology is doomed either to a blind irrationalism or an empty idealism. In sum, without the priority of the object, experience is not possible. Without a critical subjectivity, there can be no objectivity. In neither case can idealism be overcome.
Adorno's transcendental strategy and his anthropologico-materialist strategy are most evident and most elegantly discussed in O'Connor's chapter on Kant. Here he contends that Adorno's strategy is to show that Kant fails to maintain a distinction between the contributions of the object and those of the subject. Because constitution creeps into forms of intuition, because spontaneity saturates receptivity, in reality, the Transcendental Aesthetic, succumbing to antinomies, illuminates the "ideality of experience" (111). Thus, the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic are not expositions of object and subject but are two kinds of constitution. Consequently, the transcendental strategy offers, as it were, an indirect proof of Adorno's theory of experience. Likewise, according to O'Connor, the anthropologico-materialist strategy makes it clear that so long as the "I think" is spirited away or abstracted from its material context, it winds up in antinomies. Within Kant's problematic, if the "I think" is purely empirical, then it cannot be constitutive; if it is purely transcendental, then its existence cannot be justified (124).
In his conclusion, O'Connor shields Adorno from Habermas, for whom Adorno is just another modern philosopher of consciousness, and from the linguistic turn in general. Yet O'Connor fails to consider two perhaps more devastating criticisms. First, although O'Connor's version of Adorno's negative dialectic "provides an account of how we might criticize the irrationality of contemporary society" (167), it does not include reflections upon its own social conditions of possibility. By bracketing the social world from Adorno's account of non-reified experience, O'Connor maintains an undialectical separation between actuality and normativity, genesis and validity. Second, although O'Connor is well aware of the abstract nature of Adorno's negative dialectics (e.g., xi, 167), he makes no forays into Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, [End Page 177] where a more concrete understanding of experience is illuminated. If the truth of experience remains an abstraction, then it risks repeating the reifying gestures that Adorno and Benjamin worried about in Kant and, of course, in the social world.
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