I am now quarrying Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics for a number of related words, such as residue, remainder, and remnant.[1] I am skimming page after page encrusted with my fussy marks and comments in search of these words, for the book lacks an index. I am marking all the words I find in yellow, so as to lose them never again. It will take me days to find them all, but I am determined not to miss a single one of them. And then it will take me weeks or maybe months to figure out why I have set out to quarry Adorno’s masterpiece for these magical words in the first place.

Addendum I (September 21, 2008)

After two whole days of heavy labor, for quarrying is far from an easy task, especially when there are more than four-hundred dense pages to quarry, I have come up with six instances of the word “residue,”[2] three of the word “remainder,”[3] and two of the word “remnant.”[4] It is possible that I have missed these words in a few odd places, but I cannot imagine they would be of great consequence. Now comes the truly hard part, though. First I have to study all these instances in some detail, reading the surrounding paragraphs with due diligence. And then I have to figure out why I have been fascinated with all the above words ever since I first read Adorno’s masterpiece. By the way, this was in 1977, only a year after I embarked upon my Residua, which I named only after I came across this fateful book.

Addendum II (September 25, 2008)

In the end, my last rereading of Adorno’s key work yielded rather little worthy of note. All I could latch onto were the following words from his Introduction: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”[5] That is, “the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.”[6] However, I was quite delighted when I came upon these very words as soon as I searched for them in my Residua. In fact, I used them to open my critique of Adorno thirty years ago (“On Adorno’s Over-Enthusiastic Concept of Dialectics,” May 5, 1978). There I attacked the concept of the concept itself, which cannot exhaust the thing conceived, either. I concluded that dialectics cannot come even close to satisfying the traditional norm of adequacy, and that philosophizing was therefore doomed. If I remember correctly, this was precisely when I started dabbling into, as it were, literature. The whole of my magnum opus is thus my reply to Adorno. The quarrying urge justified, I guess.

Footnotes

1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (first published in 1966).

2. Op. cit., pp. 44, 53, 187, 252, 270, and 343.

3. Op. cit., pp. 5, 52, and 105.

4. Op. cit., pp. 48 and 213.

5. Op. cit., p. 5.

6. Loc. cit.