I'm re-reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit which is online. It is a text that you can read paragraph by paragraph. I would prefer to read in terms of a seminar in conversation with others than on my own, but that option is not available to me.

The next best thing is to read the text in conversation with a seminar given by somone else: in this case J.M. Bernstein's given in 1994. Bernstein had written, 'Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory', which I'd read in the mid-1990s.

Alas, I cannot recall what I'd read there. I do remember that the effect of the text was to leave my struggles with Habermas on moral philosophy, and return to Hegel to gain an understanding of ethics.

I mention this because J.M. Bernstein has a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno, which is entitled 'Negative Dialectic As Fate.' I find it very illuminating.

Bernstein argues that Adorno is a Hegelian doing philosophy after Hegel. This is what one expect in the sense that to be writing philosophy after the French Revolution is significantly different from writing philosophy after Auschwitz.

What does that mean?

Bernstein says:

Adorno's philosophy is the articulation of what it is to be a Hegelian after Hegel, after Marx, after Nietzsche, and above all after two centuries of brutal history in which the moment to realize philosophy, the hope of left Hegelians like Marx, was missed (ND,3)... Hegelian philosophy after Hegel is philosophy after philosophy was supposed to have ended. So philosophy continues, "lives on"( ND,3), through critical engagement with the conceptions of reason that were to enable us to stop philosophizing and live a human life. We have philosophy because such a life is not available, which is also an Hegelian idea, namely, that philosophy speaks to the need of culture which that culture cannot satisfy.