434 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
Adorno’s lecture at the Collège de France in March 1961 led to close
contact with a number of French colleagues over the years.^124 At the
same time, he began work on the long-cherished plan of writing a book
on dialectics. At first, he ‘just plunged straight into it. ..and later on
this created huge difficulties of organization.’^125 The book was conceived
as the sum of his philosophical thinking and would have therefore to
satisfy the highest expectations. Towards the end of 1965, it seemed to
be taking shape, but as Adorno wrote to Marcuse with some self-irony,
‘It was like the dialectical logic of Buff the Master Tailor: what he
sewed up one day, he unpicked the next.’ It is not surprising that ten
days later he added, ‘I am working very hard and am so exhausted that
I am looking forward to the few miserable days at Christmas.’^126
He had been working on Negative Dialectics for seven years, he
reflected, when he finally held the book in his hands. It appeared with
its elegant grey binding in November 1966, in an edition of 4000 copies.
When he announced the forthcoming publication to Helene Berg he
described it as ‘my chief philosophical work, if I may call it that.
.. .Henceforth, my work will be concentrated, far more strongly than
for years now, on artistic matters.’^127 Many of his letters contain com-
ments in which he stresses the huge effort that it cost him to bring this
book of all his books to fruition.
Having begun to write this large-scale formulation of his philosophy,
he used his preparatory work to produce three lecture courses which he
then gave between 1964 and 1966. In the winter semester of 1964–5,
he lectured on ‘The Doctrine of History and Freedom’, in the following
semester the subject was ‘Metaphysics’, while in the winter semester
1965–6 the lecture course bore the title of the book: ‘Negative Dialec-
tics’. These lectures provided him with the ideal forum to present his
ideas and test their plausibility before an audience. Adorno referred to
some of his listeners as ‘my pupils’. He did so not just from a sense of
pride, but because it meant that he thought of them as his equals in
discussion, people who could act as a kind of control over what he was
saying and whom he did not need to fob off with the history of philoso-
phy, let alone with formulae taken from Weltanschauungen or ‘stand-
point’ thinking.^128 The three courses^129 corresponded to the three main
sections of Negative Dialectics: ‘The Introduction expounds the concept
of philosophical experience.. ..Part Two proceeds from the results
of the introduction to the idea of a negative dialectics.. ..Part Three
elaborates models of negative dialectics.’^130
Adorno himself thought of Negative Dialectics, with its paradoxical
and antinomian structure, as one of his most complex and stylistically
ambitious books. Despite the density of its subject matter, itstransparent
structure is remarkable. The book sets its face against a type of dialect-
ical thinking that goes back to Plato and is characterized by its affirmat-
ive streak. Thus even in Hegel, the principle of negation ultimately
takes a positive turn. Adorno, in contrast, wished to deny negation the