A Theory Devoured by Thought 439logocentrism. Likewise, his concern with the history of nature was a
renewal of arguments he had developed earlier on in his lecture of 1932
on ‘The Idea of Natural History’. In the current book, he defined the
thinking subject as well as existing objectivity from the dual perspective
of a dependence upon both nature and history.
Finally, Adorno attempted in Negative Dialectics to redeem the
ambitious pledge of providing a complete rethink of metaphysics in
order to express ‘solidarity with it at the moment of its fall’.^157 Since he
had no wish to surrender the idea of a metaphysical knowledge that
‘had taken refuge in profanity’, he held on to an emphatic conception of
truth: namely to the unconditional necessity of a knowledge that is
more than thought in the sense of identification. Adorno reckoned with
a capacity for suffering and a need for sensuous happiness that resisted
the ‘world of barter where everything is interchangeable’ and that ‘does
not want the colours of the world to fade’.^158
This reference to the world of barter where everything is interchange-
able reminds us that Negative Dialectics was conceived as a contribution
to a critical theory of society which is realized ‘when things in being are
read as a text of their becoming’.^159 Nevertheless, Adorno had the feel-
ing that this aspect of the book had been sold short. He told Horkheimer
of his fears that critics might well raise this objection to the book. Does
this mean that if the book focused on the theory of knowledge rather
than the theory of society, Adorno must have conceived it as the last
great attempt at a subject–object philosophy? Or did he think he had
succeeded in overcoming the aporias of a philosophy of conscious-
ness? Whatever the case, his hope for Negative Dialectics was that the
intransigent nature of his philosophy of contradiction, his insistence
that ‘dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity’,^160 would
have a liberating effect in principle, particularly since he believed
that he had succeeded in dismantling the supposed validity of existing
reality and its transcendent self-justifications. ‘The means employed in
negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened objects is poss-
ibility – the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects
and which is nonetheless visible in each one.’^161
Despite its technical philosophical content and its high degree of
abstractness, the book found a relatively large number of readers
in a short space of time. A year after its first publication a second
reprint of 5000 to 7000 appeared. This was followed by translations into
French, Italian and English. The publisher’s blurb referred to it as an
anti-system, by analogy with anti-drama and anti-hero. It was evident
that it would not achieve the same popularity as his essay volumes.
Nevertheless, there was great interest in it, especially among young
intellectuals.
In a review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of 2 October 1967, Ivo Frenzel
described the book as ‘an extraordinary achievement that stands out
in the hardly glorious landscape of German philosophy of the present