Adorno reframes philosophy as reflecting on missed revolutionary practice

Evidence

One scholarly attempt to introduce Negative Dialectics describes the claim Adorno asserts on philosophy therein as follows: ‘The fact that “the moment to realize” philosophy “was missed” should be able to be determined ex negativo as a condition of possibility for philosophy’s survival’. Yet this and other such descriptions are hardly half the truth. Adorno does not want to show the possibility of philosophy, but rather the necessity of turning to philosophy in times when revolutionary practice is impossible. ‘Practice endlessly postponed can no longer serve as an appellate court against philosophy. – The process of reflection about why this did not happen is philosophy’. In other words, the point of philosophy should be to revise Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, to reflect on why the possibility of changing the world is temporarily foreclosed. Critique as a theoretical possibility is, for the time being, the only remaining possibility to address society as a whole. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that Adorno’s turn to philosophy is not a resignation to impossibility but a necessity grounded in the foreclosure of revolutionary practice.
• XREF: Directly engages the ‘pessimistic cul-de-sac’ reading of Adorno that the reader’s revisionist project counters. — connects to: Adorno rejected party-mediated revolutionary theory as doomed to capture or reformism — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1096; Adorno abandoned revolutionary grounding because the proletarian revolution never materialised — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1199; Bloch’s Utopian Spirit offered Adorno a magic-inflected philosophy beyond method — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 264 (+3 more)