Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to what, with reference to the democratic legislature, is usually called a rump parliament; and I will try to bring to a conclusion those hints towards the concept of a negative dialectic which it is possible for me to provide in the last two lectures. I told you, in the first place, that the thought of the mediated character of the subject prevents us, as always, from falling into the vulgar subjectivism which would have us believe that everything depends, as people like to say, on the standpoint of the beholder; but that, at the same time, the subjective mediatedness of the objective implies a critique of the type of metaphysics which acts as though metaphysics were a view upon a pure ‘in-itself’. Using a dramaturgical analogy, I have called this type of metaphysics ‘peephole metaphysics’. One looks out of the window and sees outside the stars in the black sky – a rather primitive and impossible conception, the critique of which, however, I must leave aside for today.1 In any case, the situation presented here, with both of those moments which I have described for you, gives rise at least to the appearance of paradox.2 Subjectivity is not to be explained simply from itself, but from factical society, which as an interconnected context, as a totality, is itself admittedly much more than a tangible factical given. But the objectivity of knowledge, in turn, is not to be explained simply from this dependence and is, above all, not relativized by this dependence. This paradox originates in the Cartesian norm, long established as supposedly self-evident, that explanation must ground what is later, or at least what is logically posterior, in that which is earlier and prior. The dialectical state of affairs which the subject–object relation has revealed itself to be in accordance with our earlier reflections does not answer to this norm – simply because, by virtue of the reciprocal relationship between subject and object, the distinction between a ὕστερον [husteron] and a πρότερον [proteron] in the usual sense does not apply here. In terms of that distinction, the relationship, as I have explained it, would involve a simple logical contradiction. Dialectical thought by contrast – as a philosophical approach, now, and not as an objective state of affairs – is the attempt, by means of cunning, the oldest medium of enlightenment, to unravel the knot of the paradox here, the inner bond between the mythical context of nature and the freedom which is wrested from that context. It is no accident that paradox is always the decayed form of dialectic, and this is especially the case in Kierkegaard's work. Here you will therefore be able to grasp at its root what many of you, I am sure, will experience as the most disconcerting aspect of dialectic – namely that the principle of contradiction, in its usual form, does not apply. This springs from the fact that dialectical reason longs to transcend the blind immediate context of nature without imposing in turn its own domination, the domination of reason, on this context; in other words, it attempts to transcend nature without incurring that sacrifice and rage which would merely perpetuate the same context of nature. Dialectic does not try to establish some middle ground between relativism and absolutism. It seeks the objectivity of the concept nowhere else than through the nominalism which the situation of the epoch now dictates. Dialectic strives to think conceptually the qualitative element which eludes the concept; it attempts to break through to the particular precisely as the universal, by persisting with the particular rather than subsuming it beneath the universal. The essence of dialectic is also something which has come to be, something mutable, like antagonistic society itself. It may not be falsified into some dialectic of being in itself. The extrapolation from a suffering which could be brought to an end, from an avoidable suffering which is not rooted in being itself, to a fundamental principle, would, as an abstract negation of the positive thesis of the meaning of existence, be equivalent to such a thesis. Such an extrapolation would be similar to a mythology of natural demons, would be secretly affirmative, since, as in Schopenhauer, that suffering which could be brought to an end would be confirmed as incurable, or, as in Hegel, the epitome of transience would be celebrated in its totality as its own opposite, as a kind of reconciliation. Admittedly, antagonism is no more limited to society than suffering is. If it is true that dialectic should not to be extended to nature, in the manner of a prima philosophia, it would nonetheless be equally wrong to set up two kinds of truth against each other – a dialectical one, concerned with what goes on inside society, and another kind, outside of that. The absolute division between social and extra-social being is too innocent: it fails to reveal that blind nature continues to thrive in heteronomous history. Nothing leads beyond the dialectical context of immanence but this context itself. Dialectic thinks critically about that context and registers its own movement; otherwise Kant's rightful claim against Hegel would never expire. I describe this dialectic as ‘negative’. The idea of such a dialectic marks its difference from Hegel. Even if Hegel saw determinate negation as the movens of the speculative concept, the τέλος [telos] here, the totality of all reciprocally mediated individual determinations, remained a positive one as the absolute. Identity and positivity were the same; the inclusion of everything non-identical and objective in a subjectivity expanded and elevated to the level of spirit was presented as achieved reconciliation. In contrast to this, negative dialectic thinks the power of the whole which is at work in every individual determination not merely as a negation of that individual determination but also as itself the negative – in other words, as the untrue, as that which thwarts reconciliation. The surplus, in the material parts of Hegel's later philosophy, of what is external to the subject, of heteronomous institutional power, a surplus which qualified him for the role of state ideologist in the period before the revolution of 1848, is not some mere accident or distortion of the philosophy of the absolute subject. For the principles of identity and constitutive subjectivity themselves remain particular. The total deduction of everything that exists from spirit brings all these things under the yoke of the merely existent; otherwise the two sides would never cohere. It is precisely the radical principle of identity which eternalizes the antagonism, by dint of reason's suppression, in its domination of nature, of what is antagonistic. Whatever cannot tolerate anything that is not identical with itself makes itself the adversary of that very reconciliation for which it mistakes itself. The coercive act of levelling reproduces the contradiction it would eradicate.
This is why the attempt to develop a negative dialectic is not a nuance of neo-Hegelianism or the historically superseded left-Hegelian approach, which is an accusation sometimes raised in this connection.3 The fear of being derivative, of musty academicism, which clings to every reprise of motifs that have already been codified in the history of philosophy, has long tempted precisely the most academic tendencies into advertising themselves as something which has never been seen before, as something absolutely new. This is just what reinforces the fatal continuity of that which has always been before, of what is allegedly ‘First’. However questionable the procedure which declaims all the more loudly about primordial experiences, the more promptly its categories are socially fabricated for it, thoughts are nevertheless not to be subsumed under their genealogy; this habit, too, is a part of the philosophy of origins. If we defend ourselves against forgetting, we are talking about historical forgetting, not, like Heidegger, about pre-historical forgetting – that is, against the sacrifice, enjoined almost everywhere, of that freedom of consciousness which had earlier been achieved – we are not advocating any intellectual-historical restoration. Hegel's trust in totality sought dialectic not merely, in accordance with his programme, in the process of ‘simply looking on’4 but also, with secret inconsequence, in a relatively self-sufficient method. First of all, dialectical method is a contradictio in adjecto. The reward for this is that, in the end, dialectical method cannot even posit its own concept. Along with the Cartesian–Kantian separation of form and content, Hegel wanted to do away with the conception of a portable method independent of the matter itself, a conception which corresponded to a separable form; and yet he also inevitably proceeded in a methodical fashion. The critical reconstruction of consequent thought, which would deprive negative dialectic of its potential, remains consequential itself as long as it clings to method. Without this moment of unity, dialectic would disintegrate into paradoxical insights; dialectic is always inclined to this. A liberated consciousness in its freedom would be free even of dialectic. The subjective moment in the way dialectic executes thinking represents something of this. Negative dialectic is neither a strict method nor a supposed mirroring of reality5 – as Marx, weary of an arid debate, once tried to dispatch the issue. It is not a method, because the unreconciled reality, which, precisely, lacks that identity for which thought offers a surrogate, is full of contradictions, which is revealed by the fact that every attempt to improve circumstances in a piecemeal way proves futile. It is not a mirroring, because thought is not a reproduction of the thing – as it was taken to be by the Epicurean metaphysics which claimed that matter was capable of sending out little pictures of itself6 – but is concerned with the thing itself, without recourse to images at all. The enlightening intention of thought, the process of demythologization, eliminates precisely the image-character of consciousness. All that cleaves to images remains caught up in myth, remains idolatry, and the totality of images becomes a barrier before reality; dialectic, however, means thinking in contradictions for the sake of the contradiction encountered in experience.
Critique of identity, actually pursued rather than noisily declaimed, feels its way towards the preponderance of the object.7 Identity thinking, even when it contests this, remains subjective. To turn it around critically, to ascribe untruth to identity, does not establish any equilibrium between subject and object: the restricted subject is, rather, in a certain sense, already disempowered through this very restriction. With good reason it instantly senses an absolute threat in the smallest surplus of the non-identical, for the measure is just its own absoluteness. It will come to grief, as a whole, even on something minimal, since its meaning is to be the whole. The determination of the non-identical permits reflection on the subject as mediation. But the identity principle cannot, in principle, tolerate the non-identical, for the non-identical is something which contradicts the identity principle itself. This is confirmed by the fact that the context in which subjectivity finds its variable place involves more than any context which could be developed out of subjectivity itself. The subject enters into the object in quite a different way from that in which the object enters into the subject. The object can only be thought through the subject but always remains, with respect to the subject, something other; the subject, however, by virtue of its own character, is already also object, although no aqua regia of epistemology has ever been able to distil this objective element. The object cannot, even as an idea, be thought away or eliminated from the subject. Actual existence is implied in the very meaning even of the logical ‘I think which accompanies all my representations’,8 since it has temporal sequence as a condition of its possibility, and temporal sequence must imply something temporal. The expression Dasein, or actual existence, alludes to this. That the subject exists, is derived from objectivity, and lends to the subject itself an element of objectivity; it is not accidental that the term subjectum, namely ‘that which underlies’, reminds us of just that which, in philosophy's terms of art, is now precisely called objective. Subjectivity, however, does not, in the same or in any comparable way, form part of the meaning of objectivity but, on the contrary, is only disclosed through reflection on the possibility of determining the object. It is not that objectivity is something immediate; not that, for example, the critique of naive realism could be revoked. But mediating subject and mediated object are not the same;9 even in the sphere of the highest abstractions, the concept of mediation would be too abstract. The fact that subject and object reciprocally mediate each other, that they are not ultimate entities in their own right, that we cannot infer some absolute unity behind subject and object – in short, the need to think about non-identity is the need to provide a critique of subject–object dualism. If philosophy simply persisted with this dualism, it would be false; not only as another variant of first philosophy, but because abstract dualism itself, as with Fichte's dualism of the I and not-I, would imply the primacy of the abstracting subject. To pursue this line of thought further would also mean resolving this irresolvable dualism. The pre-eminence of the object does not signify its priority; rather, it signifies the progressive qualitative differentiation of mediation in itself. Kant still allowed the moment of the pre-eminence of objectivity not to be completely silenced. He guided the subjective analysis of the cognitive faculty by the objective intention of the critique of reason10 but also stubbornly defended the transcendent thing in itself; the fully developed philosophy of identity chalked this up against him as inconsequence and as a contradiction of the theory of the categories. What Kant had in mind was that the concept of an object as such did not contradict the idea of its existence in itself; that the subjective mediation of the object was to be attributed less to the idea of the object than to the subject which remains caught up or, I could even say, imprisoned within itself. While the subject in Kant does not manage to escape from itself, it does not, despite that, sacrifice the idea of otherness. Without this idea, cognition would shrink to a mere tautology. Completely indeterminate thinking would have to create something out of an equally indeterminate material. This absurdity clearly troubled Kant's meditations more than the theorem that the thing in itself was the unknown cause of appearances, even though the critical approach specifically ascribes the category of causation to the subject. That consciousness does not ‘have’ the object, as people like to say, but is always implicit in the object does not mean that the subject could in some way be imagined without an object. The subject in both its poles is impossible without an existing being, without that which bears consciousness, or that which is implied even in the most formal conception of ‘something’. All exertions of the speculative concept, and not only Kant's, really desire the object, and the construction of transcendental subjectivity is only the magnificently paradoxical and unsuccessful attempt to achieve control of the object. To this extent, negative dialectic would like to complete what the positive, idealist dialectic already aimed at. In this sense negative dialectic also has an ontological moment, since ontology too deprives the subject of its conclusively constitutive role. But negative dialectic does not, like Nicolai Hartmann, replace the subject with the object as its static counterpart. The pre-eminence of the object can only be attained by means of subjectivity – that is, by exploring the divergence between the concept and the thing intended by the concept. One may get a little closer to the issue here – one which can be expressed in current logic only with difficulty, and which, in its abstract form, may strike you as inconsistent – by saying that, while it would be quite possible to write a prehistory of the subject, such as Horkheimer and I attempted to outline in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is no prehistory of the object, since that would already be dealing with objects from the start. If it were objected that there cannot be any cognition of an object without a cognizing subject, this would still not permit us to infer the ontological priority of consciousness. That consciousness is able to reflect upon itself as something which has originated, and that its origin can only be thought by the subject, in no way implies that it is itself the absolute origin. Analogous considerations on the genesis of the object would be nugatory. The mediation of objects can be thought in real terms apart from thinking itself; but the possibility of thinking cannot be thought without something objective. That is the qualitative difference between the proposition that everything objective is mediated through the concept and the proposition that there is no subject without an object. Mediation of the object implies that it may not be statically and dogmatically hypostasized but can be grasped only in its entwinement with subjectivity; mediation of the subject implies that, without the moment of objectivity, it is simply nothing. If we identify mediation, identification as such, with domination, this double character testifies to that of domination itself, as both true and illusory. Domination is true since nothing is exempt from domination, since nature itself is negatively determined through its exemption from domination, and thus is still determined in turn by domination. What is illusory, however, is identification and, thereby, domination, since from the beginning domination also has something arbitrary and unnecessary about it which gets passed on to all the necessities which flow from domination. An index of the pre-eminence of the object is the impotence of spirit, in all of its judgements and its attempts to arrange reality. The negative experience that spirit, through its quest for identification, has failed to achieve reconciliation, that its own pre-eminence has therefore miscarried or gone awry, becomes the motor of its own disenchantment in the disenchanted world. Enlightenment thereby transcends its own traditional self-understanding: enlightenment is demythologization not only as reductio ad hominem but also as insight into the deception perpetrated by a subjectivity which deems itself absolute. The subject is the belated, and most ancient, shape of myth, which fails to recognize itself as such.
Finally, however, it is precisely those determinations through which the concept of subjectivity, following the tradition of philosophy, distinguishes itself from things and beings that are modelled on those things and beings.11 Not only is the pure I mediated by the empirical one, not only is the object of possible thought mediated by something which does not belong to the subject, but the transcendental principle itself, in which philosophy believes that it possesses its ‘First’ with respect to things and beings, is mediated too. The transcendental principle, the universal and necessary activity of spirit, has social labour concealed within it.12 The aporetic concept of the transcendental subject – of a μὴ ὄν [mē οn], a non-being, which is nevertheless supposed to do things, of a universal which is nevertheless supposed to experience something particular – would be chimerical if it were not constructed on the model of something essentially other than the purely immanent context of consciousness. With respect to the former, the concept of the transcendental subject presents itself not only as something more abstract but also, by virtue of the way in which it transcends the latter and by virtue of its formative power, as something more real. Beyond the magic circle of the philosophy of identity, the transcendental subject would be revealed as society, unconscious of itself. This unconsciousness can itself be deduced. Once intellectual labour separated itself from bodily labour, and this separation fused with the dominating power of spirit, with the justification of the primacy of the socially privileged, spirit, already sundered, has to justify that claim to mastery which spirit makes for itself as the alleged origin or first principle and has to forget where the claim comes from if it is not to collapse. In its innermost being, spirit has an intimation that the mastery which it asserts and establishes is not the mastery of spirit at all but possesses its ultima ratio in the physical power of which it disposes. It may not, on pain of its own demise, express this thought; negative dialectic reminds it of this. The abstraction, which, even according to the testimony of extreme idealists such as Fichte, first turns the subject into a constitutive power as such, is itself one with this separation from bodily labour, as becomes evident once it is compared with the latter. When Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, argued, against the Lassalleans, that labour was not, as the vulgar socialists constantly proclaimed, the only source of wealth,13 he expressed nothing less – in a period when he had already turned away from official philosophical questions – than that work is not to be hypostasized in any form, neither in that of industrious manual production nor in that of so-called spiritual production, and that such a hypostasis only perpetuates the illusion of the preponderance of the productive principle. This spiritual principle finds its truth only in relationship to that non-identical for which Marx, who held epistemology in contempt, chose the name ‘Nature’. That which, since the Critique of Pure Reason, has constituted the essence of the transcendental subject, the functionality, the pure activity which is realized in the specific acts of individual subjects and simultaneously transcends these subjects, is not only analogous to the objective theory of value but, when seen from the outside, coincides with this theory of value, here projected onto the pure subject as an ontological ground. If Kant also limited the functionality of the subject by stipulating that the latter would be nugatory and empty without some material provided for it, he thereby unerringly confirmed the character of social labour, namely that it is work on something, a point which the greater consistency of the succeeding idealists unhesitatingly eliminated. The universality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society as a whole, which connects individual spontaneities and qualities but simultaneously curtails them through the homogenizing principle of exchange, thereby virtually disqualifying these spontaneities and qualities as impotent in themselves and entirely dependent upon the whole. The universal domination of exchange value over human beings, which, a priori, prevents subjects from being subjects, degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object and convicts the universal principle which claims to establish the predominant status of the subject of its untruth.
Yet here, at the most extreme point of ideology, the transcendental subject comes right up against truth.14 For transcendental universality is no mere fiction of the subject's, no mere hypostasis of imaginary autonomy, but has, in turn, its own fundamentum in re. It is as real as the domination which is accomplished through the principle of equivalence. The procedure of abstraction which is absolutized in philosophy is really played out in exchange society. The definition of the transcendental in terms of necessity, which consorts so readily with functionality and universality, betrays the principle of the self-preservation of the species, what Spinoza calls sese conservare.15 This principle provides the justification for the constitutive abstraction without which it cannot work; that abstraction is the element in which self-preserving reason moves. To parody Heidegger, it would hardly strain ingenuity to suggest that the necessity, die Notwendigkeit, involved in the philosophical concept of the universal could be interpreted as the imperative to avert need or distress, die Not, to supply the lack of goods by means of organized labour. This would, of course, turn Heidegger's mythology of language on its head, since in that mythology, which deifies objective spirit, any reflection on the material process which penetrates objective spirit is defamed in advance as merely ontic. How far that necessity was ideological, from the beginning, is a matter for debate. The unity of consciousness, in the end, bears the particularly visible trace of individual human experience and, thereby, the trace of things and beings. The unity of consciousness remains, as Husserl puts it, a piece of the world,16 without any priority over external reality. Insofar as the unity of consciousness is constructed upon the model of objectivity, however – in other words, insofar as it takes its measure from the possibility of constituting objects – it is the conceptual echo of the total and seamless nexus of those acts of production in society through which the objectivity of what is produced – in truth, its object-like character or Gegenständlichkeit – is formed in the first place.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am coming to the end of our lectures. In the eyes of traditional philosophy, whether idealist or ontological, I realize that something of the μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [metabasis eis allo genos]17 inevitably clings to the kind of speculations I have presented to you. Thus it might be objected, with apparent rigour, that they presuppose the very process of mediation which they then attempt to derive as something mediated: namely the subject, the activity of thought; it might be objected that all the determinations involved here, insofar as they are determinations at all, are precisely determinations of thought. But negative dialectic contradicts any positive and unconditionally total dialectic precisely because it doesn't lend itself to the postulate of some ultimate and immediate principle. It has no desire to foist upon the object the royal throne now vacated by the subject, a throne on which the object would be nothing but an idol. On the contrary, what it wishes to do is to displace hierarchy. It is quite true that the illusion of the preponderance of the transcendental subject cannot be broken immanently, by analysing subjectivity purely in its own terms. For this illusion also contains the truth – even if this cannot surgically be detached from the mediations of thinking – that society precedes the individual consciousness and everything which that consciousness experiences. The insight that thinking is mediated by objectivity negates neither thinking nor the norms which make thinking thinking. That we cannot reach beyond these norms points to our reliance on that which is not itself thinking, that which thinking would deny and try and establish on its own account. The reason for the real transcendental illusion, an illusion which goes far beyond Kant, is, however, transparent, the reason why thinking, in its intentio obliqua, always ends up, ineluctably, in asserting its own primacy, in hypostasizing the subject. For abstraction, which in the history of nominalism, ever since Aristotle's critique of Plato, has been charged to the subject as a mistaken form of objectification, is itself the principle through which the subject becomes a subject at all, is the very essence of the subject. Hence any recourse to what is not itself must always strike the subject as a wilful and extraneous act. Whatever shows the subject its own arbitrariness, whatever reveals the priority of the subject to be its own aposteriority, always sounds to the subject as if it were simply its arbitrary transcendent antithesis. As ideology, the subject is spellbound by the name of subjectivity, just as Hauff's dwarf Nase is under the spell of the herb Nießmitlust, or ‘enjoy-with-pleasure’.18 This herb was withheld from the dwarf, and he never learnt how to prepare the most delicious pie of all. Self-reflection alone could not reveal the secret either of his own deformed shape or that of his work. For this required a shock or push from outside, the wisdom of the goose Mimi. Such a ‘shock’, or Anstoß, is anathema to philosophy, especially to the highest kind of philosophy, that of Hegel. Immanent critique finds its limit in the fact that, in the end, the law of the context of immanence is one with the delusion that is to be broken through. But this moment, which alone is the truly ‘qualitative leap’, begins only once the immanent dialectic is completed. The urge to cancel itself is immanent to negative dialectic; if it were totally closed in upon itself, it would already be that totality which goes back to the principle of identity. This interest was grasped by Schelling, against Hegel, and he thereby exposed his thinking to scorn for its inconsistency, for seeking refuge in mysticism. The materialist moment in Schelling, who attributed to matter something like a motive power, may be connected to this aspect of his philosophy.19 But the leap is also not to be hypostasized, as it is in Kierkegaard. Otherwise it maligns reason. Dialectic must limit itself from within, through its own consciousness of what is. But the disappointment that philosophy cannot awake from its dream simply through its own movement, without any leap at all, the disappointment that, in order to waken, philosophy needs just what its own spell withholds: something new and other – this disappointment is none other than that of the child who cries on reading Hauff's fairy tale because the dwarf, who has escaped his own misshapenness, never gets to enjoy the triumph of serving the duke the most delicious pie of all.