Negative Dialectics

Negative Dialectics

The German Suhrkamp Verlag edition
Author	Theodor W. Adorno
Original title	Negative Dialektik
Translator	E. B. Ashton
Language	German
Subject	Philosophy
Published	1966 (Suhrkamp Verlag)
Media type	Print
Pages	416 (Routledge edition)
ISBN	0-415-05221-1 (Routledge edition)

Part of a series on the
Frankfurt School
Major works
Reason and Revolution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Eclipse of Reason Escape from Freedom Dialectic of Enlightenment Minima Moralia Eros and Civilization One-Dimensional Man Negative Dialectics The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere The Theory of Communicative Action
Notable theorists
Herbert Marcuse · Theodor Adorno Max Horkheimer · Walter Benjamin Erich Fromm · Friedrich Pollock Leo Löwenthal · Jürgen Habermas Alfred Schmidt · Axel Honneth Siegfried Kracauer
Important concepts
Critical theory · Dialectic · Praxis Psychoanalysis · Antipositivism Popular culture · Culture industry Advanced capitalism Privatism · Non-identity Communicative rationality Legitimation crisis

Negative Dialectics (German: Negative Dialektik) is a 1966 book by Theodor W. Adorno.

Summary

Adorno seeks to update the philosophical process known as the dialectic, freeing it from traits previously attributed to it that he believed to be fictive. In summary, for Hegel, the dialectic was a process of realisation that things contain their own negation and through this realisation the parts are sublated into something greater. Adorno's dialectics rejected this positive element wherein the result was something greater than the parts that preceded and argued for a dialectics which produced something essentially negative. Negative Dialectics begins, "[it] is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the 'negation of the negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy."^[1]

Influence

Adorno's work has had a large impact on cultural criticism, particularly through Adorno's analysis of popular culture and the culture industry.^[2] Adorno's account of dialectics has influenced Joel Kovel^[3] and John Holloway.^[4]

Further reading

• Dennis Redmond's updated translation of Negative Dialectics, with commentary.
• Buck-Morss, Susan. Origin of Negative Dialectics. Free Press, 1979.
• Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic. Verso, 2007.

References

1. ↑ Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno, Bloomsbury
2. ↑ James Bohman (1999). Robert Audi, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 10. ISBN 0-521-63722-8. 
3. ↑ Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 261. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5. 
4. ↑ John Holloway. Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism (2008) ISBN 978-0-7453-2836-2, ed. with Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler