Book review: John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler eds. Negativity & Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism. London: Pluto Press, 2009.

David Brian Howard

Platypus Review 50 | October 2012

[N]egative dialectics seeks the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true—today, in any case—it must also think against itself. If thinking fails to measure itself by the extremeness that eludes the concept, it is from the outset like the accompanying music with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.

— Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

NEGATIVITY AND REVOLUTION seems to fly in the face of the Adorno revival over the last twenty years. The editors bravely assert in the introduction to their book that their focus will not be on Adorno, nor about the body of his work, and, above all, that it is not written by Adorno specialists. The intent of this book, which is the outcome of a seminar at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Alfonso Vélez Pliego of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, is to elaborate on what Adorno called negative dialectics and how it might serve as a counter-strategy to other forms of theorizing the present, and could thus be of benefit to radicals, political activists, and Adorno scholars.

The attempt to maneuver Adorno’s thought into a place of relevance in the lifeless field of radical politics is, I think, a very worthwhile endeavor. However, the reader quickly confronts the danger of prioritizing Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which is that the concept of negative dialectics itself is much abused and misunderstood. Another, secondary impediment, is the fact that Adorno is still vilified by many on the Left for having called the police when the Frankfurt Institute was occupied by the student movement in 1969, and for agreeing with Habermas’s formulation that the students were “left-fascist.” This book asks, Why is Adorno a hero of revolution and political activism? For one of the editors, John Holloway, Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics and its Hegelian pedigree offers an enticing vision of theoretical depth that is “both libertarian and revolutionary.” He argues

 It is libertarian because its pivot and driving force is the misfit, irreducible particularity, the non-identity that cannot be contained, the rebel who will not submit to party discipline. It is revolutionary because it is explosive, volcanic, and refuses compromise with the capitalist totality. If there is no identity other than the identity that is undermined by non-identity, then there is no possibility of stability. All identity is false, contradictory, resting on the negation of the non-identity which it suppresses, which it seeks to contain but cannot. (13)

For Holloway, Adorno’s concept of non-identity, elucidated most rigorously in Negative Dialectics, is “the hero, the centre, the moving force of the world.” By contrast, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, distances itself from the dialectical legacy of Hegel and the arguments of Adorno, arguing that

History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed…. That is why real revolutions have the atmosphere of fêtes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself.[1]

By contrast, the emphasis throughout Negativity & Revolution is placed on rescuing the negative dialectical moment from the short-circuiting of theory by the demands of practice, “a practice which in its anti-theoreticism is left at ‘the prey of powers,’ whether that of charismatic leaders or revolutionary parties” (35). While there have been attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the work of Adorno, for instance Espen Hammer’s Adorno and the Political (2005), this book presents a unique spectrum of the political application of Hegel and negative dialectics to the twenty first century and an attempt to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of neo-liberalism and anti-dialecticism.

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