As a follow up to Kampen’s posting of her thesis outline I have posted below the abstract for my own, “Dialectics Unbound”. My advisor, who so graciously allowed me to run with a thesis on Hegel and Adorno is Winfried Siemerling at the University of Waterloo.
The outline is in a rough state, meaning that the specifics of the project will be unclear, but I welcome any comments you all might have on what you see below:
Totality and vitality are inextricably linked. Such will be the axiomatic conviction preceding the specific line of inquiry of Dialectics Unbound. The specific topic being the vital relationship between the concepts of totality and identity in the work of Theodor Adorno and G.W.F. Hegel with a focus on their respective works, Negative Dialectics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. With totality defined in terms of wholeness, completion, and fulfillment, and asserted as the royal road to vitality, the route to total life must pass through the concept of identity. However, before the dialectical contradictions of identity can be addressed, we must first develop an ethical criteria for theoretical discourse, namely a pacifistic ontology.
The introduction to this work will ground its proceeding inquiry in a discourse ethics of nonviolence, before moving on to the question of identity. The first movement will endeavor to think identity primarily in terms of a categorization in the form of a couplet. The second movement will push the concepts of identity and categorization through the dialectic as a qualified manifestation of a theoretical method. The third movement will address the issue of contradiction in the dialectical method by using and abusing the poetic figure of chiasmus (reversibility, mirroring, intercontamination). The fourth movement will conclude the inquiry with an examination of totality and vitality in the context of ontological multiplicity and plurality. The work will close with some thoughts on further directions in the area of writing, an explanation of the work’s subtitle, and more specifically the meaning of annotation in the context of ontological holism, integration, and interdisciplinarity.
The arbiter of truth presiding over Dialectics Unbound is the tension, suspension, and synthesis of two contradictory statements: Hegel’s proclamation that ‘the whole is the true’ and Adorno’s response, ‘the whole is the false’. A second mediation, transcendence, and sublation will be executed on the questionable division between ontology and semiotics. A further issue that deserves some warning and preface pertains to what the following responds to, namely the critique of totality as necessarily leading to a sort of totalitarian violence. It is upon these issues that we will focus in the pages to come.
Table of the Contents
Introduction – Groundwork for a Pacifistic Ontology
Movement One – Identity and Categorization
Movement Two – Dialectic and Method
Movement Three – Contradiction and Chiasmus
Movement Four – Totality and Vitality
Conclusion – Writing and Annotation
