Adorno on Philosophical Subjectivity

Abstract Adorno was challenged throughout the various phases of his career by the question of how philosophy could sensitively articulate or capture the particularities of the world. He never deviated from the view, first set out by him in his inaugural lecture, that the majority of available philosophical systems are distorting in that they assume that reality can be captured by pre-validated methodologies which have, he contended, no capacity to give appropriate recognition to particularities. Those particularities were the subject matter of his materialism, a form of which he adopted under the influence of Walter Benjamin. He was, however, concerned that Benjamin’s exemplary interest in the forgotten and silenced things of the world came without a satisfactory account of the philosophical subject who would give articulation to those things. This, Adorno argued, could be explained as the outcome of Benjamin’s total rejection of subjectivism. As Adorno’s career advanced, he began to believe that Hegel’s notion of dialectical thinking could serve as a model for precisely the phenomenon of interest to him: it could accommodate both material particularity and the spontaneity of the philosophical subject. This chapter shows how that commitment to Hegel was less helpful to Adorno’s project than he ever acknowledged because Hegel’s dialectic is one of contradiction rather than of differences. Furthermore, although Adorno declared himself a follower of the Hegelian method, it is evident that a different kind of philosophical subjectivity is recommended in the important “The Essay as Form” and that seen at work in Minima Moralia.