Theodor W. Adorno, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Dialectic preserved as the consequent consciousness of nonidentity. Hegel's dialectical critique of concept-intuition dualism is preserved; the closed-system Aufhebung that completes Hegel as the theodicy of self-consciousness is refused. The identity-thinking that subsumes the particular under the universal, the object under the concept, is the philosophical form of the social domination that liquidates difference into exchange-equivalence.123
Negative dialectics is not negative theology: the constructive method is the configuration of concepts in constellation around an object, the tracking of material inferences rather than the deduction of conclusions, the receptive moment of mimesis that lets the object speak against the concept that would dominate it.4 The priority of the object is the structural commitment — Copernican against transcendental idealism — and the philosophical work is the patient registration of what subsumptive logic suppresses. "True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves" (ND).5
Hegel's dialectics turns sophistical where it miscarries. What makes a dialectical impulse of the particular—its indissolubility in the cover concept—is treated as a universal state of facts, as if the particular were its own cover concept and indissoluble for that reason. This is precisely what reduces the dialectics of nonidentity and identity to a mere semblance: identity wins over nonidentity.Negative Dialectics, p. 174
Dialectics is negative by virtue of the negativity of its object. Such negativity of the universal at the same time turns cognition towards the particular as what has to be redeemed both literally and conceptually. Redemption of the particular, however, could not even begin without the universality it has set free. (29) All philosophy, even philosophy that intends freedom, drags unfreedom along in…Lectures on Negative Dialectics, pp. 165–168
He becomes Hegel's critic by following him. From the point of view of understanding, the incomprehensible in Hegel is the scar left by identity-thinking. Hegel's dialectical philosophy gets into a dialectic it cannot account for and whose solution is beyond its omnipotence.Hegel - Three Studies, pp. 147–152
Thought that is receptive to the objects has philosophical substance. Philosophy has yearned for this in vain ever since the generation of Bergson and Simmel, Husserl and Scheler. What tradition dismissed was what tradition needed. If the constraints of method are relaxed in response to self-criticism, philosophical effort will be increasingly determined by its content.Lectures on Negative Dialectics, p. 202
In fact, dialectics is neither a pure method nor a reality in the naïve sense of the word. It is not a method, for the unreconciled matter—lacking precisely the identity surrogated by the thought—is contradictory and resists any attempt at unanimous interpretation. It is the matter, not the organizing drive of thought, that brings us to dialectics.Negative Dialectics, p. 145
The most contested philosophical position in the Anglo-American reception. Habermas's communicative-action program (1981) and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) name the performative-contradiction charge: a totalizing critique of Western reason that wields reason against itself cannot ground its own normativity, must regress to either negative theology or expressive irrationalism, and the corrective is the shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the linguistic-pragmatic framework of communicative action. Bernstein's defense (the Hegelian-Adornian reading) and Hullot-Kentor's defense (the aesthetic-philosophical reading) press the case that the demand for a positive normative ground is itself the identity-thinking the dialectic refuses. Jarvis and Jameson hold the materialist line. The debate is the standing live one in critical theory.