Il negativo in questione

Adorno’s critique of Hegel goes beyond the terms of a facile opposition between a positive and reconciled formula of dialectics and a negative version that insists on unresolved conflict. It should not be simplistically placed under the sign of reiteration of the negative. On the contrary, one could say that what is damaged by Adorno’s philosophical proposal is precisely the negative in a radical sense affecting the fate of dialectics tout court. This is because the deeper meaning of Adorno’s reference to the non-identical appears, precisely, as an instance of suppression of dialectical thinking as such. That is to say, the non-identical can reveal its face only to a gaze that, paradoxically, does not consider it mainly from the point of view of negation.