Adorno transforms immanent critique into negative dialectics precisely in order to undermine the speculative identity of concept and object, essence and appearance, possibility and necessity, which Hegel postulates. ⁵⁵ Negative dialectics is the unending transformation of concepts into their opposites, of what is into what could be but is not. Revealing what could be does not mean postulating that it has to be. Quite to the contrary, negative dialectics strives to show that there is no end point of reconciliation and of insight into the necessity of the possible. In fact, Adorno's task is to show the superfluity of what is; to show that the object defies its concept and that the concept is bound to fail in its search for essence. Adorno undermines the very conceptual presuppositions of immanent critique which he practises. Negative dialectics becomes a dialectics of pure negativity, of a perpetual defiance of the actual. The discourse of negativity rejects precisely what Marx could still presuppose: that an insight into the necessity of what is would also lead to an understanding of what could be, and that what could be was worth striving for. Negative dialectics, by contrast, denies that there is an immanent logic to the actual that is emancipatory. ⁵⁶ Negativity, non-identity, demystifying that passion with which thought strives after identity, guarantee no emancipatory effects. Or, to speak with Adorno, they guarantee that these consequences will be emancipatory, precisely because they refuse to guarantee them at all. Adorno rejects the logic of immanence, while preserving immanent critique. In so far as the method of immanent critique presupposed an immanent logical development towards a growing transparency or adequacy between concept and reality, critique became dialectics, a mythology of inevitability guided by a belief in the identity of thought and being. Adorno insists upon the mediation between thought and being while denying their identity:

Totality is a category of mediation, not one of immediate domination and subjugation. . . . Societal totality does not lead a life of its own over and above that which it unites and of which it, in turn, is composed. It produces and reproduces itself through its individual moments. ⁵⁷

The task of negative dialectics is to reveal the mediated nature of immediacy, without thereby falling into the illusion that all immediacy must be mediated. This could be the case only when the totality would become totalitarian, when all moments of non-identity, otherness, and individuality would be absorbed into the whole.

With the transformation of the liberal market economy into organized capitalism, the economic basis of bourgeois individualism is also destroyed. The individual, who through his own efforts and activities

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