Abstract

This essay takes its start from the remark by Jürgen Habermas that negative dialectics is nothing more than a kind of exercise. In contrast, I propose a re-reading of Adorno’s conception of critique from a perspective that mainly has been opened up by Michel Foucault’s work on an aesthetics of existence and self-cultivation. However, Foucault could only locate the ethical significance of ascetic practices in the aesthetic freedom of self-transgression. The normative content of negative dialectics as an exercise also arises from the relation to freedom. But the aesthetic exercise emerging thereby is nourished by a paradigm of a transformative subjectivity, which is characterized by a paradoxical communication between the subject of identity and the non-identity of the subject with itself. Negative dialectics as a way of cultivation is thus inextricably linked to the experience of the »failure of culture«. Thereby a new understanding of Adorno’s conception of experience-bound metaphysics appears.