180130 SE Introduction to Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Adorno (2017W)

The essential aim of dialectics consists in its attempt to capture the age in thought. In this, its speculative, historical and social achievements are considerable: with the Hegelian dialectic, systematic philosophy achieved its most concentrated and expansive form; with Marx’s materialist dialectic, philosophy assumed for itself the status of an historical force capable of radical political change; through Adorno’s negative dialectic, the memory of the dialectic’s speculative and historical failures eventuated in a form of “last philosophy” that would no longer perpetuate the domination of the general over the particular. In each instance, dialectics proceeded according to the demand that philosophy become the equal of the contemporary via a wholesale reconstruction of traditional philosophical forms and categories.

Through close readings of Hegel, Marx and Adorno, the present course offers an introduction to dialectics that reconstructs how dialectics has set age-old oppositions – between concept and idea, subject and object, form and content, mediation and immediacy, whole and particular, system and fragment – within dynamic relations of interpenetration so as to transform philosophy from that love of knowing with which it has long been familiar into that form of actual knowing philosophy has never known but to which it has always aspired.