How can activists strive against the political paralysis that characterises the anti-dialectical Marxism of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, with no reverting to a dogmatic orthodoxy? This e-book explores suggestions within the ‘negative dialectics’ of Theodor Adorno.
The poststructuralist shift from dialectics to ‘difference’ has been so well known that it turns into tough to create significant progressive responses to neoliberalism. The participants to this quantity come from in the anti-capitalist circulate, and shut to the worries expressed in Negri and Hardt's Empire and Multitude. despite the fact that, they argue forcefully and persuasively for a go back to dialectics so a real-world, radical problem to the present order might be constructed.
This is a passionate name to fingers for the anti-capitalist stream. it may be learn by means of all engaged activists and scholars of political and significant theory.
“As anyone who studied with Theodor W. Adorno 40 years in the past it's interesting to work out how more youthful generations of students proceed to paintings with Adorno's tools and hold his insights alive.” —Prof. Detlev Claussen, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz collage of Hannover
“This booklet may perhaps good were titled ‘Reading Adorno Politically.’ utilizing Adorno's paintings as touchstone and emphasizing the originality of his adverse dialectics, those essays interact essentially the most vital debates between modern political theorists and activists.” —Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire and Multitude
“A high quality assortment that demonstrates the relevance of [Adorno's] unfavourable dialectics to modern events of resistance to capitalist globalization.” —Alex Callinicos, Professor of ecu stories, King's collage London
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Extra resources for Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism
Sample text
Therefore, Negative Dialectics is not an “abstract” document in that derogatory sense, for it approaches a modality of thought whose characteristics – its dialectic and negative character, but also its own “abstract” character – derive from highly “concrete” determinations of its object. Holloway 01 chap01 42 2/10/08 11:09:19 AN TAGO N IS M A ND D IF F ER ENCE 43 It is enough to have a quick look at the first movements of Negative Dialectics in order to confirm this. Dialectics emerges from the observation of the difference between the object and its concept, Adorno argues (1990: 4), a difference which becomes contradiction vis-à-vis the inherently identifying nature of thought.
The two begin to diverge when Adorno decisively rejects any effort to emancipate difference from negativity in the sphere of thought as long as this emancipation has not occurred in the sphere of reality, and Deleuze tries, no less forcefully, to do precisely that. The object and its concept cannot be reconciled in the sphere of thought – as Hegelian dialectics set out to do – but neither can this difference between the two be emancipated in the sphere of thought from its reduction to negativity, as the Deleuzian philosophy of difference claims.
This argument is not without certain ambiguities, but we accept its conclusion: “An investigation of economic class, then, like an investigation of race, should not begin with a mere catalogue of empirical differences but rather with the lines of collective resistance to power” (Negri and Hardt 2004: 104). And this conclusion decisively exorcises the ghost of liberalism. Indeed, if the concept of multitude is defined in terms of collective resistance against power, it becomes incompatible with the coexistence of differences which liberalism embraces.