If the whole is the bane, the negative, then the negation of the particularities which have their epitome in that whole remains negative. Its positive would be solely the determinate negation, critique, not a circumventing result, which the affirmation could happily hold in its hand. [...] What is positive in itself is fetishized from the vernacular, in which human beings praise what they positively would be, finally to the bloodthirsty phrase of the positive forces. By contrast what is to be taken seriously about the unwavering negation is that it does not lend itself to the sanctioning of the existent. The negation of the negation does not make this revocable, but proves that it was not negative enough; otherwise dialectics remains indeed what in Hegel it was integrated into, however at the price of its depotentialization, indifferent in the end towards what is posited at the beginning. What is negated is negative, until it has passed away. [...] That the negation of the negation would be a positivity, can only be argued by those to whom positivity, as a universal conceptuality, is already presupposed at the outset. It rakes in the spoils of the primacy of logic over the metalogical, of the idealistic deception of philosophy in its abstract form, justification in itself.-T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics 161-3
3 comments:
I would love to dive into a wealthy conversation on the negation of whole to particulars.
But I'm guessing its only worth it if I read the 'whole' of Adorno's 'Negative Dialectics'?
Uh, no one has to read the "whole" of that thing. That's the beauty of it, really. What do you mean "the negation of whole to particulars?"
Just a honest appeal to the vicious circularity of whole(s) and particular(s).
I mainly meant the negativity to a whole in relation to some unspecified particular.
My statement is considerablly bias though, I may have read into Adorno before I thouroughly begin to throw out statements for the sake of substance.
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