Being Hegelian
reply to Simon Jarvis
pp. 73-77
in: Gary Browning (ed), Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
In his account of the Hegel—Adorno relationship in "The "Unhappy Consciousness' and Conscious Unhappiness," Simon Jarvis underlines the thesis that whatever his critique of Hegel and however he departs from Hegel, Adorno accepts the rudiments of Hegelian idealism and speculation whilst providing a reading of Hegel that does not retreat before the standards his philosophy sets. Adorno is an objective idealist to the extent to which he denies there is a philosophical "first," be it mind or nature, subject or object: there can be no mediation without 'something" which is mediated, and no presentation of pure immediacy without its mediations. Even more significantly, Adorno's project aims at 'speculative identities' that are the product of dialectically working through experiences of diremption. If these ideas represent the inner core of Hegelianism, and I do not wish here to contest Jarvis' claim that they do, then there is at least a prima facie case for construing Adorno as an orthodox, authentic Hegelian; and, in part, that is a large component of the elaboration of the Hegel-Adorno relationship which Jarvis offers. Yet, at the end of the day, Jarvis proffers a version of the most standard criticism of Adorno — "that he ends up treating the non-identical as a kind of Absolute" — whilst implicitly defending Hegel against the Adornoian charge that when the claim of 'system" itself appears in a Hegel text, say as Absolute Knowing (in the Phenomenology) or as Absolute Idea (in the Logic), then his dialectic falls back into identitarian thought in which the object is reduced to what makes it commensurable with the self-preserving, labouring subject — subjective idealism after all.
