La superiorità quasi giocosa della dialettica. Sull’Introduzione alla dialettica di Adorno

Abstract

This article outlines the contents of Adorno’s 1958 lectures Einführung in die Dialektik. The main topics of the lectures are briefly summarized in the first three paragraphs, namely: the «movement of the concept», which Adorno conceives as the essential aspect of Hegel’s dialectic (lectures 1-4); the role of contradiction in the idealist and materialist dialectic (lectures 5-9); dialectic’s relationship to the methods of the empirical sciences, to language, and to other rival fields of contemporary philosophy (lectures 10-20). The last paragraph discusses the overall meaning of Adorno’s statements about the lasting modernity of dialectic and focuses on some later developments in his thought (especially his 1966 theory of the «priority of the object»). Eventually, I suggest that the uniqueness of Adorno’s philosophical position consists in a specifically dialectical form of negative thought, which strongly challenges the common cliché of his alleged theoretical and political quietism.