Adorno and negative dialectics: The case of feminist religious agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adorno is a complex philosopher whose ‘negative dialectics’ can serve as an antithesis to simplistic constructions of knowledge in which subject and object can be known and defined. Adorno’s philosophy can appear opaque and difficult to parse through for an account of feminist identity theory that can navigate between universalism and particularity. However, some feminists have found inspiration in the application of Adorno’s theory of non-identity to push for an approach to identity in which they are not reduced to difference. To outline the relevance and applicability of Adorno’s negative dialectics to feminist analysis, I will first expound on the specific themes of his ethical theory that are pertinent to feminist methodology, broadly speaking, and religious feminist agency, in particular. Specifically, I will show his emphasis on multiplicity through the idea of constellational thinking, and his emphasis on responsibility through mechanisms of circular checks on privilege and action as a part of negative dialectics. Then I will show how Adorno’s identity theory contains within itself a dialectical approach from above – with an eye to concretizing theory in reality – but also from below – through a direct connection with mental experience and subjectivity. In the end, I sketch the applicability of this theory for politics with textual evidence and examples. Finally, I will show how some feminist theorists have found Adorno’s philosophy useful for their cause and have applied his theory in different ways. After this there will be a section describing the literature on postcolonial religious agency and how Adorno’s theory can be a useful touchstone in feminist efforts to add more multiplicity and responsibility within its theorizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.071 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".