In this chapter I move outside Hegel's own text to discuss Theodor Adorno's attempt to produce a ‘Materialist’ conception of dialectic in his final major work of philosophy, the Negative Dialektik. But considerations from Chapter 1 explain why such an examination may itself contribute to the understanding of Hegel's text. I suggested there that it is possible for concepts to turn out to have an identity which in fact goes beyond the way that they function to organize those texts in which they are originally used. That does not make the tracing of their functioning in those original texts superfluous, but it suggests that we may need to add a dimension to interpretation beyond the original text, in order to approach the concept's final identity. So, just as Marx claims that the concept of surplus value developed in Das Kapital represents the truth of that concept of value which the classical economists, Smith and Ricardo, had used but misunderstood, it might be that the ultimate identity of the concepts in Hegel's theoretical writings are only established after a materialist transformation of his system.

Adorno himself is committed to the possibility of such a materialist transformation by an immanent critique of Hegel's dialectic; indeed he goes so far as to make the possibility of a critique of Hegel into a condition for the continuation of philosophy: