There are two ways to break out of this “idealism”: either one rejects Hegel’s dialectics as such, dismissing the notion of the subjective “mediation” of all substantial content as irreducibly “idealist,” proposing to replace it with a radically different matrix (Althusser: structural (over)determination; Deleuze: difference and repetition; Derrida: différance; Adorno: negative dialectics with its “preponderance of the objective”); or one rejects such a reading of Hegel (focused on the idea of “reconciliation” as the subjective appropriation of the alienated substantial content) as “idealist,” as a misreading which remains blind to the true subversive core of Hegel’s dialectic.
This is our position: the Hegel of the absolute Subject swallowing up all objective content is a retroactive fantasy of his critics, starting with late Schelling’s turn to “positive philosophy.” This “positivity” is found also in the young Marx, in the guise of the Aristotelian reassertion of positive forces or potentials of Being pre-existing logical or notional mediation. One should thus question the very image of Hegel-the-absolute-idealist presupposed by his critics — they attack the wrong Hegel, a straw man.
What are they unable to think? The pure processuality of the subject which emerges as “its own result.”
This is why talk about the subject’s “self-alienation” is deceptive, as if the subject somehow precedes its alienation―what this misses is the way the subject emerges through the “self-alienation” of the substance, not of itself. […] 261
What if, in its innermost core, Hegel’s dialectic is not a machine for appropriating or mediating all otherness, for sublating all contingency into a subordinated ideal moment of the notional necessity? What if Hegelian “reconciliation” already is the acceptance of an irreducible contingency at the very heart of notional necessity? What if it involves, as its culminating moment, the setting-free of objectivity in its otherness? 262
In other words, Adorno does not see how what he is looking for (a break-out from the confines of Identity) is already at work at the very heart of the Hegelian dialectic, so that it is Adorno’s very critique which obliterates the subversive core of Hegel’s thought, retroactively cementing the figure of his dialectic as the pan-logicist monster of the all-consuming Absolute Notion. 262