Negating the Positive on the Border : Early Adorno's Integration of Psychoanalysis with Epistemology

Though it has engaged little attention, T. W. Adorno's unsuccessful dissertation of 1927 entitled 'The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind' can be read as the first explicit expression of his epistemological methodology. In this lengthy paper, Adorno struggled not only to relate the transcendental theory of Kant to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, but to elaborate the notion of the unconscious as "boundary notion (Grenzbegriff)", one of the most subversive conception for his long term theory-practice. Such boundary notions as the unconscious and the thing-in-itself in Kantian philosophy, Adorno argues, should prove in themselves the existence of a split between their implication (that is, the field beyond the border of consciousness, experience etc.) and the fact that such notions can exist exclusively within the border of the consciousness, experience, and so on. The cognizance of this antinomical contradiction in boundary notions required him a twofold reflection : on the one hand, the delusion of the barely transcendent has to be dispelled through a nonmetaphysical exploration; on the other hand, he has to avoid forging a sort of monistic empiricism. And this dilemma can only be resolved in a theoretical practice of resetting the boundary of our notional recognition forward. This is why Adorno, in his later career, continuously negated the positive use of boundary notions (say, Heidegger's "being") so that the potential of the negative could be kept solely in the contradiction of words, and made us realize that every human knowledge, even about the transcendent, is based on a material procedure (=language). My essay attempts to analyze how he managed to transform both Kantian theory and Freudian psychoanalysis into this kind of uniquely materialist epistemology in terms of his paradoxical understanding of language