Negative Dialectics (work)

Negative Dialectics (1966) is Adorno's systematic articulation of a philosophy that refuses system. The book argues that conceptual thought is inherently identificatory—it operates by subsuming particulars under universals, by asserting that this specific thing is an instance of that general category. The operation is indispensable but necessarily violent: the particular always exceeds the category. Hegel's dialectic claimed to preserve the particular through Aufhebung—the simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and elevation into higher unity. Adorno argued this was the problem: sublation cancels what matters most, the particular's stubborn refusal to be anything other than itself. Negative dialectics is the self-correction: using concepts to identify what concepts cannot grasp, mobilizing thought against thought's totalizing tendency, preserving the non-identical as the remainder that escapes every classification.