A negative dialectic must affirm synthesis while negating it in every concrete case

Evidence

So it is, at the very outset, with the idea of the dialectic itself, which had in Hegel “as its foundation and its result the primacy of the subject, or, in the well-known language of the introductory remarks to the Logic, the identity of identity and nonidentity.” But the very mark of the modern experience of the world itself is that precisely such identity is impossible, and that the primacy of the subject is an illusion, that subject and outside world can never find such ultimate identity or atonement under present historical circumstances. Yet if that ultimate synthesis toward which dialectical thought moves turns out to be unattainable it must not be thought that either of the terms of that synthesis, either of the conceptual opposites which are its subject and object, are any more satisfactory in their own right. The object considered in itself, the world taken as directly accessible content, results in the illusions of simple empirical positivism, or in an academic thinking which mistakes its own conceptual categories for solid parts and pieces of the real world itself. In the same way, the exclusive refuge in the subject results in what is for Adorno the subjective idealism of Heideggerian existentialism, a kind of a historical historicity, a mystique of anxiety, death, and individual destiny without any genuine content. Thus a negative dialectic has no choice but to affirm the notion and value of an ultimate synthesis, while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 119

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core negative-dialectics stance: synthesis is affirmed as a value yet negated as a possibility, and neither pole — object as positivist illusion or subject as Heideggerian mystique — offers refuge.
• XREF: Directly names Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian existentialism; this is the Frankfurt-School lineage the reader is tracking. Also points back to the Hegelian ‘identity of identity and nonidentity’. — connects to: Negative dialectics theorizes why dialectical thinking is both indispensable and impossible; Negative dialectics replaces unity with what lies outside conceptual domination — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2534; Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 170 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The double refusal — both positivist object and existentialist subject are shown as reciprocal illusions, leaving only the task of negating every concrete synthesis — is the precise hinge of Adorno’s method.

Broader Connections

• A perpetual failed synthesis keeps the in-itself and for-itself inseparable yet independent #expands (0.85)
• Negative dialectics replaces unity with what lies outside conceptual domination #expands (0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2534
• Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once #corroborates (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170
• Negative dialectics rejects systematic progression in favor of releasing the non-identical #expands (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2545
• The duality of negations grounding being-for-others is irreducible to any synthesis #qualifies (0.75)