Negative dialectics theorizes why dialectical thinking is both indispensable and impossible

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

According to the preface, negative dialectics attempts by means of logical consistency to substitute for the unity principle, and for the paramountcy of the supraordinated concept, the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2534 (#expands, via linked claim)

The very grandeur of logical deductions may inadvertently take on a provincial quality. Benjamin’s writings are an attempt in ever new ways to make philosophically fruitful what has not yet been foreclosed by great intentions. The task he bequeathed was not to abandon such an attempt to the estranging enigmas of thought alone, but to bring the intentionless within the realm of concepts: the obligation to think at the same time dialectically and undialectically. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dialectical thought is self-reflexive thinking about thinking, unlike scientific objectivity — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 103; Dialectical thought is inherently comparative across heterogeneous operations — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 103; Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 170 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170
• Negative dialectics replaces unity with what lies outside conceptual domination #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2534
• A negative dialectic must affirm synthesis while negating it in every concrete case #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 119
• Negative dialectic fails massively yet that failure is no discredit #qualifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 1393
• Dialectical analysis sees a thing through awareness of what it is not #expands (0.80)