Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialectics Ppr)

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece Theater
Review: I once had a professor who exclaimed to me that Negative Dialects was "impossible," "the most obscure, impenetrable philosophy every written." From that moment, I knew that I must read this book.
The first reading was a disaster. I'd read nothing else of Adorno, knew only very superficially Kant and Hegel, and consequently made it to about the end of the fifth page before throwing it down in disgust.
But I persevered, read Teddie's lectures, the Hegel Studies, the Culture Industry essays, and most importantly, read Kant's Critiques and Hegel's Logic--strangely, the fog started to disappear and little gems began popping up everywhere.
Other reviewers are correct that this text is obscure, but it is never willfully so. It has an analogous place in Adorno's Oeuvre to Difference and Repetition in Deleuze's. It is a skeleton key to his whole philosophy, but you can't understand it until you already understand that philosophy. So it goes. I say this only to frighten readers off who are about to make the same mistake I initially did. Truly, it is impossible to understand this book without a more than passing knowledge of Kant and Hegel, at least, and without some familiarity with Adorno's ideas. I'm serious about this: I don't mean "impossible to understand" in the sense that you'll think you understand it but really you don't. I mean it in the sense that it will read like Attic Greek, and will be, as my professor said, "impenetrable."
But if you feel prepared, then this book will be a goldmine. Adorno's critiques of Heidegger, Kant, and Hegel are included here in massive detail, and then bound up together in his grand vision of society and thought. And they are all so brilliant, you feel as though you've died and gone to philosophical seventh heaven. Whatever your bents as a thinker and whatever your opinions on the aforementioned giants, exposing yourself to Adorno's razor sharp dialectical blade will only enhance your capacities and broaden your opinions. This text, along with Bergson's Matter and Memory, may be the two most criminally ignored works in philosophy today. It is inexcusable to not come to terms with Adorno, even if only to rip him to shreds.
But that by the way. If you want to know what this book is "about" then I certainly can't tell you. The gist of it is that concepts do not fit objects without leaving a remainder, a fact which logical thought, our thought, must see as a contradiction. This sets dialectics in motion. "Negative" means basically that focus is directed to the remainder, to the "non-identity," instead of, as with Hegel, to reconciling that remainder with the concept. A similar line of thought, in case you're interested in another criminally neglected masterpiece, is pursued in Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption.
Good Luck, and may the force-field be with you!

Rating:
Summary: Read it at your own peril
Review: Famously bad translation of the central piece of Adorno's philosophy. I recommend getting Aesthetic Theory now and waiting for the next translator's attempt.

Rating:
Summary: Wait for new translation
Review: Famously bad translation of the central piece of Adorno's philosophy. I recommend getting Aesthetic Theory now and waiting for the next translator's attempt.

Rating:
Summary: unfashionable sense
Review: Michel Foucault once stated that it was a great tragedy that the Frankfurt School and the French post-structuralists were unaware of each other's work. He felt that the two schools of thought could have gained much from dialogue, and this text illustrates his point in its relatedness to postmodern discourses on the limits of knowledge and the ends of positivistic philosophy.

Adorno addresses the relationship between the concept and the nonconceptualities, which is nothing more that the relationship between discourse and the Other in post-structuralist phraseology. The text is extraordinarily difficult - not always a problem explainable via the difficulties of the ideas involved - and I often find myself spending an hour reading and re-reading a page or two before being able to come to terms with the content. Personally, I enjoy such difficult reading, however, and find it an avenue for developing critical reasoning skills at the sime time as I re-investigate the problems addressed in the difficult prose.

I highly recommend this text for anyone interested in pessemistic, carefully thought-out discourses on the limits placed on understanding by the "pigeon-holeing" of conceptualization, anyone who enjoys cracking hard nuts via time, sweat, and frustration, and anyone looking for a difficult text to read superficially and criticize emptily as being an example of the poverty of post WWII continental philosophy. In a sense, it is a book for all . . .

Rating:
Summary: Read it at your own peril
Review: Negative Dialectic is very thought-provoking and difficult text in itself, but it is worth of the effort. If you are interested in Adorno, it is a must-have. Yet the English translation is unbearably inadequate, you may make better sense of it, if you consult with the original German text. The companion piece to Negative Dialectics is Adorno's Prism. Get Prism first, and wait for a better translation of ND.