Vladimir Safatle’s new book, Dar corpo ao impossível: O sentido da dialética de Theodor Adorno (Giving Body to the Impossible: The Meaning of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, 2019), shows that he ought to be counted among the impressive list of dialectical thinkers in Brazil: Antonio Candido, Roberto Schwarz, Paulo Arantes. We might thus ask, before discussing Safatle’s book, why has such a rich dialectical tradition emerged in the periphery? It is not simply that the dialectic has been taken from one context and “applied” in Brazil. The dialectic is premised on the rejection of such methodologism, that is, the idea that principles can be justified first and then put into practice. Instead, the dialectic always begins in the middle of a conceptually mediated socio-historical situation. The historical context in which the Hegelian dialectic itself emerged has been brilliantly reconstructed by Paulo Arantes in his Ressentimento da dialética (1996), a work that unfortunately remains largely unknown outside the Portuguese-speaking world. Arantes traces the emergence of the dialectic to Germany’s peripheral status relative to classical bourgeois society, to the disjuncture between radical philosophical theory and intransigent political institutions from which intellectuals were alienated. The socio-historical conditions for the dialectic were brought into relief for Arantes by Roberto Schwarz’s diagnosis of the same sort of dissonance between ideas and reality in nineteenth-century Brazil, when the elite cynically adopted liberal ideology despite its blatant contradiction with the slave economy.1 While Schwarz shows how liberal ideas reveal their truth when they appear “out of place” in the periphery, Arantes historicizes the Hegelian dialectic and uncovers its political content.

We might say that what Arantes does for Hegel in Ressentimento da dialética, Vladimir Safatle does for Adorno in Dar corpo ao impossível.Safatle, indeed, suggests that his reconstruction of Adorno “could perhaps only really occur in a country like Brazil” (249). Working through the negative dialectic in the periphery, Safatle historicizes Adorno’s thought and uncovers its radical potential. In this way, Safatle challenges the view that Adorno’s negativity commits him to nihilism and political passivity. Safatle shows, instead, how the negative dialectic preserves the force for social transformation through its process of dissolving worlds, through disclosing contradictions that reveal latent tendencies that until then seemed impossible. Moreover, Safatle insists that Adorno’s work continues, rather than breaks with, the Hegelian dialectic. Safatle’s book is far-ranging, and he offers engaging discussions of links between Adorno’s negative dialectic and a host of non-dialectical thinkers, including Freud, Heidegger and Deleuze. But I’d like to focus in this review on what I take to be the most compelling aspects of the book, namely, Safatle’s discussion of the Hegel-Adorno relation and his argument for the significance of the negative dialectic in the periphery. I’ll conclude the review by asserting, even more emphatically than Safatle himself does, that the periphery constitutes a condition for the possibility of the negative dialectic in Dar corpo. To do so, I’ll make explicit how this dialectic, by incorporating truths revealed in the way the periphery demands “a certain stabilization in anomie” (250), a way of following and violating norms at the same time, highlights the limitations of normative readings of Hegel and emphasizes the need to bring Hegel and Adorno together to account for both the resilience of norms when they have lost all authority and for the possibility of radical social transformation.

The first section of Dar corpo, “The Emergence of the Negative Dialectic: Hegel, Marx, Adorno,” reconstructs the fundamental concepts of the negative dialectic—totality, contradiction, non-identity, the infinite, materialism—in order to argue that Adorno’s philosophy articulates and develops Hegelian dialectics. Adorno’s critics hold that he, having abandoned the positive-rational moment of synthesis in the dialectic, commits himself to nihilism or a conception of the non-identical that boils down to Kant’s thing-in-itself. Relatedly, Adorno’s incessant insistence on negativity appears to rule out any political action, in particular the possibility of structural transformation. But Safatle shows, by detailing Adorno’s theoretical debts to Hegel and Marx, that the disintegrating character of the negative dialectic is inseparable from the emergence of a true totality. Safatle insists that what animates Adorno’s project is the sort of movement Hegel describes in the 47th paragraph of the Phenomenology. “Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away,” Hegel writes before then offering the peculiar image of “the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.”2 Gillian Rose, in her essay “From Negative Dialectics to Speculative Thinking,” points to the same passage as evidence that Adorno strays from Hegel, but Safatle, without naming Rose, explains how this movement of “arising and passing away” defines an “emergent dialectic” shared by Adorno and Hegel. Emergent properties belong to the whole, not the individual parts, and an “emergent dialectic” thus “comprehends that the actualization of the productive force of totality implies structural transformations” because it “dissolves the identity of the parts,” “as if the emergence of totality had the power to retroactively cause its moments” (35). The negative dialectic, therefore, does not disavow totality. It retains it as a critical category that reveals the falsity of the existing whole and the possibility for “the emergence of that which could be different and has not yet begun” (35). Because it deals with what “has not yet begun,” the negative dialectic does not delineate what is merely possible in a given situation. Rather, it produces modes of collapse, the disintegration of worlds, making possible what, to use Safatle’s oft-repeated Portuguese phrase, até então (until then) appeared impossible. The significance of this negativity, for Safatle, ought to be grasped in light of the context of the mid-twentieth century welfare state. Unlike, for instance, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which takes for granted the grammar of social relations in the welfare state and limits itself to procedures for resolving conflicts within those relations, the negative dialectic negates the modes of integration into the total state.

To adequately reconstruct ideas of dialectical collapse and the emergence of totality, Safatle turns to the concept of contradiction. For someone like Axel Honneth, contradiction indicates the “normative deficits of phenomenon in relation to their own concepts” (49). Or, in a more familiar understanding of Adorno, contradiction might seem to designate “an object devoid of concept” (50). Such a notion of contradiction would commit Adorno to a sort of Kantian philosophy in which finite concepts remain tragically inadequate to the infinite. But Safatle insists that Adorno, like Hegel, holds to an internal relation between contradiction and the infinite, such that the infinite “describes forms of self-relation that are immediately self-negations and self-determinations” (50). We might think here of how Hegel reads Antigone in terms of the collapse of Greek ethical life. “[T]he Greek polis,” Safatle writes, “shows itself to rest on a principle that, once realized, enters into contradiction with the limits of its own modes of determination” (59). Safatle proceeds to argue that this conception of the infinite as self-realization and self-negation lies at the heart of Adorno’s account of authentic works of art. Schoenberg’s Moses and Aron, for instance, exhibits for Adorno the “preestablished disharmony” whereby artworks “faithful to their truth content must destroy themselves in the process, since their procedures of integral construction must be posited and must fail” (71). Throughout these examples, Safatle traces contradiction as a real, not merely logical, force that “destroys the world as stable horizon of experience and social life” (57), allowing for the emergence of unprecedented configurations.

A question raises itself at this moment: how can the negative dialectic refuse synthesis and retain the category of totality? In order to answer this question, Safatle begins by underscoring Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s figures of reconciliation: namely, the state, World Spirit, and the identity of subject and object within the absolute. This leads Safatle to formulate two ways of understanding totality as a dialectical category. In the first case, which he associates with Georg Lukács, totality consists of deterministic relations. The necessary character of these relations allows Lukács to hold his concept of imputed class consciousness, that is, to deduce the consciousness the proletariat should have if it grasped the totality of capitalist social relations. In the second case, totality is understood in terms of process, “as a system open to periodic and infinite disequilibrium, since the continuous integration of new elements initially experienced as contingent and indeterminate reconfigures the meaning of the rest” (89). In light of the latter conception of totality, Safatle discusses Adornian mediation and mimesis. As Adorno insists, mediation is not a middle between extremes. Mimesis, accordingly, cannot be understood as some sort of common denominator between subject and object. Instead, mimesis consists in mediation in the extremes. The subject, in this form of mimesis, “finds, within itself, a ‘nucleus of the object,’ in the sense of an opacity belonging to the resistance of what objects to the integral presentation of consciousness” (92). This would appear to run counter to the image of the Hegelian subject assimilating all difference, but Safatle shows how Adorno’s concept of mimesis takes inspiration from Hegel’s statement, “The being of the I is a thing (das Sein des Ich ein Ding ist)” (94). A more significant disagreement between Hegel and Adorno could be found in the notion of universal history. Adorno takes issue with the sacrificial logic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, the way particulars get instrumentalized for the realization of the universal. Against Hegel’s optimistic view of historical progress, Adorno famously writes in the Dialectic of Enlightenmentthat “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (101). And yet, Adorno does not simply dismiss the concept of universal history, holding, instead, that it “must be constructed and negated” (100). Universal history is a “permanent catastrophe,” but this definition is not simply nihilistic because it “presupposes a social suffering following from the consciousness of something unrealized in history” (101). Even though it is on the question of totality that Adorno would seem to definitively break with Hegel, Safatle’s discussion shows that “the difference between Adorno and Hegel” might be better understood “as a strange difference between Hegel and himself” (110).

Mimesis also figures centrally in Safatle’s account of Adorno’s materialist twist on Hegelian dialectics. If mimesis consists of self-recognition in the object, it necessarily entails for Adorno a “somatic dimension of modes of relation” (135). Marx himself anticipated such a thought in his critique of Hegel’s abstract conception of alienation. Safatle argues that when Marx speaks of overcoming alienation through appropriation, he does not evoke a “relation of property.” Instead, he gestures toward what Adorno will formulate as mimesis, a “synthesis that operates at the level of sensibility,” a “relation between non-identities that mutually transform each of the terms in relation” (134). In this discussion, Safatle draws out the connection between property as a legal category and as a form of logical predication. The proletariat, he compellingly proposes, lacks properties in both senses. This conception of the proletariat, for Safatle, lies behind Adorno’s apparent rejection of class politics. Adorno may have turned away from “organizing as a class” because it was “based on the acceptance of an ontology of properties” (139), but Safatle shows that Adorno, for all his pessimism, enables a conception of the proletariat as “an ontological position linked to generalized dispossession as the condition for effective action, along with being linked to the expression of negativity and the irreducibility to predications as the fundamental position of the subject” (140-141). This move, with and away from Adorno, highlights Safatle’s impressive ability to historicize the dialectic. Safatle argues that Adorno formulates the negative dialectic as a critique of the welfare state, of its forms of integration. But Safatle does not simply restrict Adorno’s thought to his historical context. Working through the negative dialectic in the periphery, where the welfare state never achieved the stability of mid-century Europe, Safatle can both see the historical limits of Adorno’s thought and the current possibility of extracting radical potential from his work. Now, in the ongoing collapse of modernization, “critique can once again insist on the dynamics necessary in the emergence of political subjects” (128).

Some readers may express skepticism at this interpretation of Adornian politics. After all, didn’t Adorno reveal his conservative side when he failed to support student activists in the sixties? In response to this skepticism, Safatle neither condemns Adorno nor vaguely suggests that he had good reasons for dismissing this activism. Safatle holds that Adorno never renounced revolutionary praxis. He discusses in detail Adorno’s responses to development of the SPD, his worries about the rise of neonazism and his recognition that the student movement in Germany failed to connect with workers. This leads Safatle to formulate thoughts on the role of intellectuals. Refusing both the idea of the intellectual as a spokesperson for the proletariat and the picture of Adorno comfortably contemplating the scene from the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” Safatle insists that “the intellectual class has a disintegrating function that only appears in an effective form when it assumes for itself the desire for revolutionary praxis, when its non-participation is active” (216).

This discussion of intellectuals continues when Safatle turns Paulo Arantes. Moreover, at this point in the argument, Safatle makes explicit the role of the periphery in his reconstruction of the negative dialectic. As Arantes and Roberto Schwarz have persuasively demonstrated, thinking about Brazil is inseparable from the dialectic because of the need to recognize the identity of opposites: backwardness and modernization, liberal ideology and slave labor. The periphery is characterized by a duality of mental life, in which “synthesis by integration ends up confirming what should be overcome or incessant passages in opposites that could even lead to an unprecedented coexistence between modernization and archaism, that is, to a certain stabilization in anomie” (249-250). In this context, Safatle articulates a negative dialectic that would bring about the “dissolution of solidarity among opposites” (251), rather than seek to integrate them as in the conservative modernization of, for instance, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade. Paulo Arantes exemplifies for Safatle such a negative critique, “a dialectic that would refuse to give a positive answer to the dilemmas of duality” (250). We can see this in Arantes’s work, which, as I indicated earlier, elaborates on the notion of “out of place ideas” and the fertile observation that the peripheral situation closely resembles that of Hegel and the German idealists. Arantes takes up Marx’s insight that the German idealists, unlike early political economists, faced political institutions that refused to carry out their ideas. Moreover, in contrast to French political thinkers, they lacked a social base that was moved to action by their philosophical programs. On the one hand, this context leads to the characteristically exaggerated role attributed to ideas in German idealism. “[T]he history of intellectuals,” Safatle writes, appears as the “history of an extreme oscillation between figures of ineffectivity” (256). But, on the other hand, it also underlines the emergence of the dialectic as the possibility of “a certain alliance between subaltern classes and the intellectual class,” an alliance that would bring about “the force of dissolution of the very worlds of intellectuality, its progressive movement of real transformation, giving an organized ground to the abstraction of indeterminate negation” (260). This analysis leads Arantes to an anti-philosophical stance, since philosophy primarily serves to legitimate state power in late twentieth-century Brazil. But Safatle insists that Arantes does not abandon philosophy; rather, it remains implicit in his work. Drawing on Arantes’s own work on German nihilism, Safatle argues that Arantes embodies a “true nihilism” that does not lament unrealized possibilities or withdraws into paralysis. Instead, this true nihilism “puts into action a ‘negative energy’ that can only be understood as the consequential taking of a position on the nullity of everything that is finite,” leading “to the implosion of the finite” (265). Arantes’s more recent work, O Novo Tempo do Mundo (2014), stands out for Safatle because it renders explicit these philosophical commitments and their links to the “negative energy of the subaltern classes” (260). This work diagnoses the collapse of a certain Hegelian conception of history, but rather than despair at this loss, Arantes connects it to the negativity—and hence possibility—of the 2013 insurrection in Brazil.

Safatle closes out Dar corpo by revisiting a debate between Roberto Schwarz and Bento Prado Jr. on the national novel. Polemically, Safatle argues that the negative dialectic is most effectively at work not in Schwarz, but in the contribution of Prado, the “anti-dialectical thinker par excellence” (272). Schwarz, following in the footsteps of Antonio Candido, speaks of a dialectic of malandragem (roguery) in his influential essay known in English as “Objective Form.” But Safatle insists that “there is no dialectic of malandragem” (263), at least not in the negative sense that he articulates in this book and in the sense that Schwarz articulates in his own work on Machado de Assis. In constantly passing back and forth between order and disorder, the dialectic of malandragem stabilizes a situation in anomie rather than embodies “a negative energy that pushes the structure to ruptures and revolutionary transformations” (263). Moreover, Safatle takes up Prado’s critique that Schwarz rejects the autonomy of literature in assuming “the continuity of consciousness and being, between lived experience and structural knowledge” (272). It is Prado, not Schwarz, who remains faithful to the Adornian idea that “art becomes social through its opposition to society” (274), by determinately negating, not copying, social relations.3 In mid-twentieth century Brazil, the novelist who best exemplifies this negativity for Safatle is João Guimarães Rosa. His novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) must be read against the background of the horizon of “integration” and “social pacts” that underlined national development projects (277). This work exhibits “the transformative force of contradiction,” not through the sort of “dynamic of integration” one finds in Oswald de Andrade, but in “a disintegration capable of opening space for the total reordering of contents” (280). More specifically, Grande Sertão carries out this negativity through its characteristically “inappropriate” language. It is, in other words, a language that cannot be conceived as belonging to pre-existing identities, a language that undoes the identitarian basis of developmentalist social pacts. Politically, Grande Sertão does not simply seek to “expand the horizon of possible demands to be recognized” (289). More profoundly, through this language of inappropriation, it dissolves the “modes of constitution of demands,” opening space for the “emergence of what until then were nonexistent enunciating subjects” (289). In this way, aesthetic autonomy appears not as moral autonomy, which is premised on individual self-determination. Indeed, aesthetic autonomy appears “as heteronomy from the point of view of moral autonomy,” but by making “worlds collapse,” aesthetic autonomy constitutes the “practice of heteronomy that is the true autonomy” (296).

In a response to reviews of her book Mourning Sickness, Rebecca Comay asserts, “We don’t need Hegel to tell us” what has become the calling card of contemporary Hegelians like Pippin and Pinkard, namely, “that normative authority is precarious, that it is socially and historically constituted, and thus inevitably loses traction.”4 Instead, Hegel confronts the “more painful question” of how norms “impose a kind of normativity even in the absence of all authority.”5 To elaborate this aspect of Hegel’s thought, Comay draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, but “normativity in the absence of all authority” aptly describes what Safatle takes to be a central dilemma of mental life in the periphery, namely, that norms must be simultaneously followed and violated. Indeed, I would argue that the periphery offers a rich ground for thinking through the limitations of normative readings of Hegel that center on practical contradictions and institutional rationality. The history of Brazil offers no shortage of examples in which the inadequacy of rules fails to generate a normative pressure to transform the rules or the practices they govern.

In this way, the contradictions of the periphery might seem to confirm Adorno’s pessimism about historical progress when compared to Hegelian optimism. We might recall Adorno’s statements about how late capitalism has eroded the very bourgeois ideals that used to be the basis of immanent critique. But Safatle’s Dar corpo suggests something quite different, a radical potential drawn from Hegel and Adorno and made possible paradoxically by the peculiar “stuckness” of the periphery. The recurring experience in the periphery of practical contradiction without overcoming makes a normative interpretation of Hegel appear inadequate. If such an interpretation rests on a “subtle teleology” of “gradualist … conceptual improvement,”6 the dualisms of peripheral social life suggest a blockage in movement. But a blockage not only impedes gradual conceptual improvement. It also builds up energy until it erupts as the dissolution of a world, of a normative horizon of expectations and interpretations. This is why Safatle suggests that this book could perhaps only have been written in Brazil. In thinking through the peripheral situation alongside other dialectical thinkers, Safatle recognizes the centrality of modes of collapse in Hegel’s dialectic and he shows us that we can agree with Adorno that there might be nothing worth fulfilling in bourgeois society without this committing us to a pessimistic paralysis since what until then—“até então”—seems impossible undergoes in the hands of the negative dialectic “a redescription that opens new possibilities for action” (123).

1. Luiz Philipe de Caux and Felipe Catalani, for instance, suggest that Arantes extends Roberto Schwarz’s notion of “ideas out of place,” showing how it “does not only apply to the Brazilian case, but can help explain the emergence of the dialectic itself at the beginning of the 19th century in Germany.” Luiz Philipe de Caux and Felipe Catalani, “A passage do dois ao zero: dualidade e disintegrção no pensamento dialético brasileiro (Paulo Arantes, leitor de Roberto Schwarz),”Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 74 (2019), 121.
2. G. W. F Hegel,The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press (2018), 27.
3. This is, I feel obliged to clarify, a misreading of Schwarz. As Schwarz insists in the “Objective Form” essay, successful works of literature cannot be understood as a mere illustration of a pre-existing social structure. A novel compels conviction as a plausible account of social relations through the “almost total separation” of “the novelistic sphere” and reality. Roberto Schwarz,Two Girls and Other Essays, Verso (2012), 24.
4. Rebecca Comay, “Hegel: Non-Metaphysical, Post-Metaphysical, Post-Traumatic (Response to Lumsden, Redding, Sinnerbrink),”Parrhesia 17 (2013), 54-55.
5. Comay, “Hegel” 54.
6. “Hegel” 57.