Adorno and Hegel. Truth, experience, and the ‘workshop’ of dialectics

Aim of the paper is to highlight the influence of Hegelian dialectics on the elaboration of Adorno’s negative dialectics, focusing, in particular, on the fact that the latter must be read not so much or not only as an uncompromising critique of the first one. Rather, negative dialectics must be read as an immanent critique of the Hegelian model, i.e. as its rethinking from within and, at the same time, as an attempt for its continuation and reconfiguration, on the basis of an initial and profound understanding of it. This becomes clear in a series of Adornian materials dated between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, which constitute a sort of ‘constellative’ work, where Adorno puts dialectics under analysis in its structure and operativity. Starting from these studies, I reconstruct some moments of this process of elaboration, through which dialectics is put into motion, put to the test, revised from within and, eventually, reshaped according to a negative paradigm.