This paper explores the relationship between the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Jiddu Krishnamurti. It focuses upon how both thinkers employ a determinately negative epistemology and revise Hegelian dialectics as a manner of ratiocination to resolve socio-political problems. It is argued that Krishnamurti’s negative epistemology is rendered more robust when read along with Adorno’s critical theory, aesthetic theory, and notions of negative dialectics and non-identity thinking. It is hoped that this synthesis of thought raises the possibility for ongoing creative (...) responses to contemporary socio-political challenges over and above either political demonstration or intellectual retreat. (shrink)

A critical and creative reconstruction of Adorno's conception of truth that shows its relevance for comtemporary philosophy, art, and politics.

Focusing on the notion of the subject in Sartre's and Adorno's philosophies, David Sherman argues that they offer complementary accounts of the subject that ...

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) publishedCritical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contempo-rary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen (...) selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assump-tions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Adorno’s conception of utopia within the context of his critique of the concept of progress. It contests the standard interpretation which conveys Adorno’s conception of utopia to be imbued with an essentially extra-historical idea of redemption. I argue, contrary to this view, that the motif of redemption surfacing in Adorno’s conception of utopia negates a specific type of historical life – life under which historical consciousness sinks into oblivion – rather than history per se. In order to (...) reveal the historicality of Adorno’s conception of utopia, I examine his fragmentary yet consistent critique of the concept of progress, which, far from calling for total abandonment, aims to access and unearth its truth-content. Last but not least, I visit Adorno’s suggestion regarding the consonance of utopia with genuine progress, assessing its implications vis-à-vis a characteristic feature of mythological life, the ratio of self-preservation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs efforts towards reconciling the thought of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno gained momentum in the last decade, it seems an array of essential discrepancies have been failing to receive due attention. This article aims to foreground and explore one particular philosophical difference which stands in the way of such endeavours, focussing on Adorno’s and Arendt’s conceptualization of nature. It is argued that while Adorno’s philosophy is poised to redeem nature from the pangs of false enlightenment, Arendt’s redefinition of political (...) existence upholds not only the careful separation of politics from nature but also emphasizes the former’s superiority. Revisiting a set of arguments raised by Adorno against fundamental ontology such as the questions of hypostasis and tautology, it is explored in what ways Arendt’s conceptualization of nature as eternal recurrence markedly and perhaps irreconcilably differs from the normative import of Adorno’s understanding, which emphasizes the concrete unity of nature with history. (shrink)

Art-science, as its name suggests, combines art with science. The idea of combining art and science raises the question whether the outcome, art-scientific works, can succeed against a standard properly belonging to them. In other words: can there be such a thing as an art-scientific work, or do such works merely belong to either art or science while superficially seeming to belong to the other sphere as well? Surprisingly perhaps, these concerns overlap with a chief point of contention as regards (...) Adorno’s mature thinking, in particular his Aesthetic Theory ([1970] 2002): whether or not it is coherent to believe that knowledge can have an aesthetic form. This essay is motivated by the thought that Adorno’s reflections are useful for understanding contemporary art as well, and the burgeoning paradigm of art-science represents a welcome occasion to ask the reverse question: can art become theoretical? The first aim of this essay is, accordingly, to consider how Adorno’s negative dialectic of philosophy and art might illuminate the field of art-science, how its works might express sui generis truths. In turn, an examination of how the aestheticisation theme in Adorno might be appropriated for the business of art-science critique, might tell us something about the relationship between artistic content and philosophical interpretation, beauty and truth, in Adorno. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that critical theory needs to make its socio-ontological commitments explicit, whilst on the other hand I will posit that contemporary social ontology needs to amend its formalistic approach by embodying a critical theory perspective. In the first part of my paper I will discuss how the question was posed in Horkheimer’s essays of the 1930s, which leave open two options: (1) a constructive inclusion of social ontology within social philosophy, or else (2) a program (...) of social philosophy that excludes social ontology. Option (2) corresponds to Adorno’s position, which I argue is forced to recur to a hidden social ontology. Following option (1), I first develop a metacritical analysis of Searle, arguing that his social ontology presupposes a notion of 'recognition' which it cannot account for. Furthermore, by means of a critical reading of Honneth, I argue that critical theory could incorporate a socioontological approach, giving value to the constitutive socio-ontological role of recognition and to the socio-ontological role of objectification. I will finish with a proposal for a socio-ontological characterization of reification which involves that the basic occurrence of recognition is to be grasped at the level of background practices. (shrink)

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative . Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts (...) to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradict.. (shrink)

In this article I re-examine Adorno's and Horkheimer's account of the disenchantment of nature in Dialectic of Enlightenment . I argue that they identify disenchantment as a historical process whereby we have come to find natural things meaningless and completely intelligible. However, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that modernity not only rests on disenchantment but also tends to re-enchant nature, because it encourages us to think that its institutions derive from, and are anticipated and prefigured by, nature. I argue that Adorno's (...) Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory show how constellations and artworks generate an alternative form of reenchantment which is critical of modernity and its domination of nature. This form of re-enchantment finds natural beings to be mysteriously meaningful because they embody histories of immeasurable suffering. This experience engenders guilt and antipathy to human domination over nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article articulates the idea of a disclosing critique of society. It starts from the assumption that the curiously organicistic undertones of Adorno’s negative social ontology is part and parcel of a disclosing gesture in his social criticism. It then traces Adorno’s debate with social organicists to the point where the critical theorist’s own concept of society emerges with a claim to be critical in itself. It is argued that this critical claim is enforced by a disclosing gesture. To (...) articulate what is at stake in this gesture of critical disclosure a parallel is drawn, and contrast made, to Emerson’s conception of disclosure as “drawing a circle around a circle”. The relationship between Adorno’s and Emerson’s conceptions of critical disclosure is complex. However, their juxtaposition allows for a distinction between two directions of critical disclosure. It will be argued that disclosing critique of society can be understood as an exemplary dissociation from alienated society by means of a creative association of empirical knowledge, poetic description and philosophical speculation by a critic standing, as it were, with one foot inside and the other outside our form of life. (shrink)

At the centre of Adorno’s critical theory of society lies the problem of Bann or Bannkreis: why do individuals systematically act in ways that reinforce conditions that are obviously incompatible with their freedom and pursuit of happiness? Despite criticism of Dewey’s experimentalism by several Frankfurt School critical theorists claiming that the American pragmatist fails to account for systematic blockages to critique, Dewey does in fact formulate his approach to social critique as a response to the problem that social life might (...) be made immune to transformative claims. In Human Nature and Conduct, thirty years prior to Adorno’s Bannkreis, he conceptualizes a ‘vicious circle’ in which attempts to transform social life seem to be caught and points to a way out. This article shows that Adorno and Dewey share in a project at the heart of critical theory, the project of a disclosing critique of society. In different and mutually completing ways, the Frankfurt School critical theorist and the American pragmatist point out the extent to which their contemporary societies are caught in antagonistic and painful vicious circles and thereby point to the objective possibility of another form of social life. The article is historical, but it is animated by the intent to brush a fruitful path for disclosing critique today. From Adorno, this critical practice gains the idea that theory of society can be a disclosing gesture, which presents an important corrective to Dewey’s failure to trace the eclipse of the public. From Dewey, it gets a reminder that these theories must find ways to continue into ordinary life experience through group action for their disclosure to come full circle. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between ethics and metaphysics in critical theory through immanent criticism of Fabian Freyenhagen's reconstruction of Adorno. Endorsing Freyenhagen's overall defence of Adorno's position, it argues that several important features of Adorno's position as Freyenhagen interprets it can be made intelligible only on broadly Aristotelian metaphysical presuppositions. These should be thematized explicitly rather than ignored. Moreover, these metaphysical presuppositions are on independent grounds plausible, as recent Aristotelian and critical realist work has indicated, and special difficulties arising (...) for them in the context of a radical negative critical theory can probably be overcome. Further conversation between critical theorists, Aristotelians and critical realists should prove fruitful in elaborating and defending a radical critical theory alternative to the dominant postmetaphysical paradigm. Progress in this direction, though, will entail rejecting the basic postmetaphysical premise that critical theory must proceed in a metaphysically neutral way. (shrink)

This article argues—against the present compatibilist orthodoxy in the philosophy of criminal law—for the contemporary relevance of a kind of critique of criminal law known as the ‘determinist challenge’, through a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno’s thought on freedom and determinism. The article begins by considering traditional forms of the determinist challenge, which expressed a widespread intuition that it is irrational or inappropriate for the criminal law to hold people responsible for actions that are causally determined by social and psychological forces (...) in such a way that they cannot be said to have acted freely. Yet as traditionally presented it was possible for its opponents to interpret this challenge as an incompatibilist position within the traditional free will/determinism debate, and to present compatibilist arguments against it—in particular, that the determinist challenge is unmotivated and has implausible implications. It is argued that these compatibilist objections hold only on a certain interpretation of the determinist challenge, but that this interpretation is not the only one available. Adorno’s distinctive position on freedom and determinism is presented as an alternative version of the challenge, which cannot be assimilated to the terms of the traditional compatibilist/incompatibilist disputes. This novel, ‘metacritical’ version of the determinist challenge is essentially a social–historical, not metaphysical, thesis about the moral significance of the freedom-undermining effects of modern social forms. As such, it is argued, it is invulnerable to the usual compatibilist objections, and presents a serious challenge to our criminal legal institutions. (shrink)

The article contributes to creating an outline of the significant postwar theoretical approaches that examine the role, purpose, and significance of architecture in war and war crimes. Starting from the Clausewitz thesis that?war is not autonomous?, this paper attempts to reveal?the blood that has dried in the codes?, politics hidden behind the four walls of architecture. From the concepts of Brutality in Stone, Warchitecture or Forensic Architecture, through the lenses of architecture, the article exposes war, politics, and ideologies that shape (...) and drive architecture by reimagining and repurposing it both in its primary, functional and cultural, representative sense. A shift from?the era of the witness? to the decade of evidence promotes architecture and its remains to the level of science, global governing, and law. The connection of timely-distanced emancipatory practices influenced by Holocaust studies establishes a discursive field for architecture as a performative rather than representative practice. The theoretical frame of the postwar landscape as second nature is crucial for discussing the role of architecture in the Holocaust. Furthermore, it stresses the work of Herscher and Weizman as a contribution to the critique of the depoliticized processes of resolution of the contemporary war crimes and post-conflict reconciliation. Architecture as a societal practice could potentially have a central position in memory and knowledge production, as well as the production of a counter-public sphere. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno's concept of 'natural history' [Naturgeschichte] was central for a number of Adorno's theoretical projects, but remains elusive. In this essay, I analyse different dimensions of the concept of natural history, distinguishing amongst (a) a reflection on the normative and methodological bases of philosophical anthropology and critical social science; (b) a conception of critical memory oriented toward the preservation of the memory of historical suffering; and (c) the notion of 'mindfulness of nature in the subject' provocatively asserted in Max (...) Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. These strands are united by the notion of transience and goal of developing a critical theory sensitive to the transient in history. The essay concludes by suggesting some implications of an expanded concept of natural history for issues in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Adorno and Heidegger are frequently aligned because of apparent similarities in their critiques of modern epistemology. This alignment fails, however, to appreciate the substantial differences in the philosophical presuppositions that inform those very critiques. I distinguish Adorno's negative dialectic from Heidegger's fundamental ontology under the respective designations of critical versus phenomenological forms of transcendental philosophy. I argue that only by understanding Adorno's negative dialectic as a revised version of epistemology (namely a dialectical epistemology, committed to subject-object and transcendental argument) can (...) we make sense of, first, the profound differences between Adorno and Heidegger on the question of epistemology and, second, the philosophical motivations behind Adorno's trenchant rejection of Heidegger. Key Words: being-in-the-world • - dialectics • - empiricism • - epistemology • - idealism • - identity • - immediacy • - irrationalism • - mediation • - project • - subject • -object • - transcendental. (shrink)

This paper discusses corporate entanglement, impactfulness and responsibility in the Anthropocene, amidst events and conditions that ‘uncontain’ time. It takes its direction of travel from artist Brian Jungen’s ‘Cetology’ (2002), a whalebone sculpture made out of cut-up plastic garden chairs, which conjoins the times of earth and world history, as it hangs in the air of the art gallery, ‘as if’ exhibited in the natural history museum. The paper relates ‘Cetology’s’ engagement with natural history, time, and commodification to matters of (...) corporate entanglement and responsibility within company law and governance. Problems with understanding the comparable imprint of large and multinational companies on matters, places, and communities are identified, after the domination of corporate legal frameworks over nature and the stability and perfection of economic incentives at law. The reading of this (critical-legal) situation is developed through theory and engagement with materialist and critical thinkers, who unite in their concern with distributed human–nature relations and the ‘concreteness’ that attends collisions in time, ruin and affect. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s writings are central to this analysis, and strengthen the commentary on ‘natural history’ themes curated by Jungen. The paper contemplates how times’ uncontainment might invoke a change in expectation and method for the company law field, assigning contingency to the corporation and provoking a new mode of reflection about corporate entanglement and responsibility at law. (shrink)

What unifies the accounts of history and progress presented by Adorno's Critical Theory and Metz's political theology? I show: that both resist the ‘magic spell’ of an Enlightenment totality on whose strength the violent excesses of modernity have been built; that both accomplish this resistance by memory of victims or the ‘losers of history’; and that both hold out hope for the possibility of progress in time. However, the two accounts differ in important ways. These differences stem from: the transference (...) of historical subjectivity from homo emancipator to the God of Jesus’ passion; the role of the ‘eschatological proviso’ in guaranteeing theological futuricity; and the fullness of Metz's eschatological justice as compared to Adorno's conception of progress as the mere ‘avoidance of catastrophe’. This project brings the work of one of the most influential social critics of the twentieth century into dialogue with that of a politically engaged theologian of the same historical-cultural context. In doing so, I hope to suggest the theological richness of Metz's approach but also the significant contributions of dialectical criticism to the practice of theology in the modern era. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes (...) some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess. (shrink)

Adorno’s ‘addendum’ names the experience by which socially constrained agents are jolted into resistance against their suffering. The impulse to action is simultaneously intra-mental and somatic, and thus forms the locus of a jointly conscious and bodily impetus to confronting the ideological and material forces that produce contemporary unfreedom. In this way the ‘addendum’ is a historically developing, indeterminate, yet inexhaustible glimmer of hope for both agents and theorists who make social suffering central to their critical analysis. This article explores (...) the structure of the addendum by unpacking its presentation first in Negative Dialectics and then by way of the one-sided and cautionary illustrations of Buridan’s ass and Hamlet in the History and Freedom lectures. While aesthetic, ideal, affect-centered and Freudian interpretations of the addendum have been developed, appreciating the somatic or bodily, the intra-mental or conscious, and the historicized accounts of nature and reason that Adorno weaves together to explain ever-present possibilities of resistance requires instead a non-reductive materialist and dialectical lens. (shrink)

The point of departure for this article is a comparative study of Adorno and Arendt on the question of evil and modernity. To be precise, I observe how Adorno and Arendt present us with very different ways of understanding radical evil as an expression of the modern project of acceleration. This divergence presents us with a problematic which does not fit easily into the framework of the contemporary post-metaphysical engagement with evil. The latter projects a relational, non-substantive concept of evil (...) addressed under the order of collective memory and against the background of a normatively neutralized order of history. Yet I show, by tracing the continuities and discontinuities which exist between Arendt and Adorno’s conceptualizing of radical evil, on the one hand, and the different elements of this contemporary engagement, on the other, how the initial problematic is symptomatic of a continuing investment in history and can only be addressed in terms of such an investment. This investment is the product of a dynamic between history and memory, informing the work of both thinkers, which partially intersects with the Hegelian strategy of theodicy. I thus conclude with a consideration of whether certain aspects of the latter should be rehabilitated. (shrink)

The concept of natural history has received a great deal of attention in contemporary practical philosophy, especially as a result of Michael Thompson's concept of natural-historical judgments which aims to explain the normativity of the human life-form. With this concept, the norms effective in a life-form are understood as something natural and constitutive for that life-form. Although Thompson does not present a historical-philosophical model, he claims to be able to determine the normativity of the historically developing human life-form. By contrast, (...) Theodor W. Adorno developed his own concept of natural history on the one hand as an interpretative conceptual model of historical reality, on the other hand, to indicate the normativity of the natural-historical course of human history itself. The normativity of natural history that Adorno focuses on is historically and socially determined, in contrast to the categorically conceived natural normativity that is at the heart of Thompson's approach. This article analyses the similarities and differences between the two approaches in such a way that it becomes clear to what extent ethical naturalism also provides possibilities for critique that can be made fruitful for a critical theory inspired by Adorno. (shrink)

This paper attempts to assess the state of the contemporary debate over humanism. Beginning with a brief recap of the main historical meanings of the concept of humanism itself, it details both the most recent articulation of the humanist standpoint in the work of Tzvetan Todorov and his "critical humanism" and the most potent anti-humanist replies in W.G. Sebald and Giorgio Agamben. While concerned to critically evaluate these new constellations of the debate, its main contention is not to wholly endorse (...) either position nor to consign the opposition itself to the past but rather to explain why this has not happened and consider where the figure of humanism stands today. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

In "Two sorts of Naturalism" John McDowell is sketching his own sort of naturalism in ethics as an alternative to "bald naturalism". In this paper I distinguish materialist, idealist and absolute conceptions of nature and of naturalism in order to provide a framework for a clearer understanding of what McDowell’s own naturalism amounts to. I argue that nothing short of an absolute naturalism will do for a number of McDowell's own purposes, but that it is far from obvious that this (...) is his position. If he directly denies that it is, he seems to be left with some rather awkward choices. (shrink)

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can (...) understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves. (shrink)

This article argues for a reconceptualization of utopia as akairological rupture. Its central thesis disputes the conventional reading of utopia as a teleological goal to be realized by a social collective. Thus rather than viewing the potentiality of utopia as a prescribed ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live in harmony, I argue that it should be seen as an akairological rupture, manifested through a determinately negative, individual, approach. In this reading, utopia is primarily a social condition within culture, and perennially opposed (...) to any ideal telos. This temporal and qualitative reconceptualization of utopia as disruptive is anathema to the positive reading that sees it as feasible through social reform and rational discourse. This reconceptualization argues for the importance of developing a reading of utopia that can transcend any reified, fixed conception that seeks to domesticate it in the service of a contingent political aspiration, however noble and humanitarian it may appear to be. Herein lies its critical potentiality under neoliberal conditions. (shrink)

This article examines the relation between the critical theory of Moishe Postone and the philosophy of Theodor Adorno. While the former is clearly influenced by the latter, these influences mostly stay implicit. When explicit, he does not so easily put his own thought in line with Adorno’s and is highly critical of him. I will investigate the ways in which ideas from Adorno made their way into Postone’s work, but also where the latter diverts from them. As will be shown, (...) Postone’s critical theory runs into a problem when one examines the immanent ground of his critical norm, freedom. Adorno, on the contrary, does succeed in employing the same norm in his own immanent critique. I will conclude that the problem Postone encounters can be avoided by being more of an ‘Adornian’, and that his theory allows this. (shrink)

Although Adorno criticizes the existential tradition, it is frequently argued that he and Heidegger share a number of theoretical interests. Adorno does come into direct contact with existential thought at certain points, but it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, who more closely approaches his concerns. I begin by reviewing Adorno's Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. I then argue that, unlike Hegel, who is also criticized by Adorno on various grounds, Kierkegaard has had an influence on Adorno that has been underappreciated. While (...) Adorno criticizes Kierkegaard for breaking off the subject-object dialectic, they converge in their attacks on identity-thinking, the retention of a negative utopian standpoint of critique, and a deliberately provocative style of writing, all of which are marshaled in defense of the individual, who is besieged by modern society. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, and despite the generally accepted view, I conclude by arguing that because Adorno does not break off the subject-object dialectic, he has the necessary theoretical resources to deal with the theory-practice problem. Key Words: Adorno • communication • dialectic • individual • Kierkegaard • subject-object • subjectivity • theory-practice. (shrink)

The article explores the character of Adorno’s materialism while fleshing out his Marxist-inspired idea of natural history. Adorno offers a non-reductionist and non-dualistic account of the relationship between matter and mind, human history and natural history. Emerging from nature and remaining tied to it, the human mind is nonetheless qualitatively distinct from nature owing to its limited independence from it. Yet, just as human history is always also natural history, because human beings can never completely dissociate themselves from the natural (...) world, nature is inextricably entwined with human history. Owing to the entwinement of mind and matter, humanity and nature, a version of dialectical materialism can be found in Adorno’s work. Key Words: body • dialectics • Hegel • history • idealism • Marx • materialism • mind • nature • Timpanaro. (shrink)

This essay explores the use of the concept of the messianic by Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. Throughout his work, Agamben consistently presents his reading of the messianic as an alternative to what he considers to be the ‘pessimistic’ negative dialectics of Adorno, which he argues ‘is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. For Agamben, the messianic brings dialectics to a ‘standstill’. This essay analyzes this deployment of the ‘messianic’ in his thought, and contrasts it with the perspective of Adorno. (...) Agamben’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin is challenged with reference to a debate between Adorno and Benjamin over theology, dialectics, and politics. (shrink)

The concept of second nature promises to provide an explanation of how nature and reason can be reconciled. But the concept is laden with ambiguity. On the one hand, second nature is understood as that which binds together all cognitive activities. On the other hand, second nature is conceived of as a kind of nature that can be changed by cognitive activities. The paper tries to investigate this ambiguity by distinguishing a Kantian conception of second nature from a Hegelian conception. (...) It argues that the idea of a transformation from a being of first nature into a being of second nature that stands at the heart of the Kantian conception is mistaken. The Hegelian conception demonstrates that the transformation in question takes place within second nature itself. Thus, the Hegelian conception allows us to understand the way in which second nature is not structurally isomorphic with first nature: It is a process of ongoing selftransformation that is not primarily determined by how the world is, but rather by commitments out of which human beings are bound to the open future. (shrink)

El concepto de segunda naturaleza promete proporcionar una explicación de cómo la naturaleza y la razón se pueden reconciliar. Pero dicho concepto está cargado de ambigüedad: se entiende como aquello que une todas las actividades cognitivas y se concibe como un tipo de naturaleza que puede ser modificada por actividades cognitivas. Se intenta investigar esta ambigüedad distinguiendo una concepción kantiana de otra hegeliana. Se sostiene que la idea de una transformación de un ser de prim- era naturaleza en un ser (...) de segunda naturaleza, que se encuentra en el corazón de la concepción kantiana, es errónea. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhile Hegel’s concept of second nature has now received substantial attention from commentators, relatively little has been said about the place of this concept in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This neglect is understandable, since Hegel does not explicitly use the phrase ‘second nature’ in this text. Nonetheless, several closely related phrases reveal the centrality of this concept to the Phenomenology’s structure. In this paper, I develop new interpretations of the figures ‘natural consciousness’, ‘natural notion’, and ‘inorganic nature’, in order to (...) elucidate the distinctive concept of second nature at work in the Phenomenology. I will argue that this concept of second nature supplements the ‘official’ version, developed in the Encyclopedia, with an ‘unofficial’ version that prefigures its use in critical theory. At the same time, this reconstruction will allow us to see how the Phenomenology essentially documents spirit’s acquisition of a ‘second nature’. (shrink)

In this paper I interrogate the actuality of Adorno’s concept of nature in the light of the contemporary environmental crisis. In particular, I try to understand what happens to the critical force of Adorno’s concept of nature if we accept that a decisive turn has been taken in the domination of nature. I articulate two key aspects of Adorno’s critical theory that I think are important resources for thinking in a time of potential environmental catastrophe, which are the themes of (...) a dialectical understanding of reason and nature and the theme of “lifeless life.” I then question whether two key mediating concepts in Adorno’s dialectic, namely the concepts of self- reflection and self-preservation, need to be rethought. Finally, I consider how the concept of a reconciliation with nature, a concept central to the first generation of the Frankfurt school, can be thought anew in an era marked by ever increasing human domination of nature. (shrink)

This article develops a critique of the notion of the Anthropocene through the lens of Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s late style. The popularisation of the term Anthropocene has been accompanied by the emergence of two seemingly opposed discourses: one response could be characterised in terms of a Promethean faith in science, and the other as a turn towards new materialism. While the differences between those two approaches could hardly appear greater, they converge at their margins: both operate on the assumption (...) that the Anthropocene signifies a nature-culture continuum. It is at this point that Adorno’s work, and, in particular, his thinking on aesthetics can make an important intervention. For Adorno, the recognition of the historical truth of the distinction between history and nature is the driving force of critique, the comportment of which Adorno regards as most clearly expressed in artworks, in particular, in music. I read Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven’s late works as a contrasting response to a situation that is pervaded by the experience of finitude. In lending form to transience, the compositions of the late Beethoven, as seen through Adorno’s eyes, attain exemplary status for a dialectical rethinking of nature and history: While Beethoven’s compositions of the middle period let history retreat beyond the semblance of reconciled nature, his late style, in turn, makes explicit the historical nature of what has been “naturalised” by the semblance of the reconciled whole. It is precisely in its commitment to negativity that Beethoven’s late style becomes instructive to us in a time of crisis. (shrink)

This article focuses on the importance of Hölderlin for Adorno’s comprehension of the art–nature relationship. Adorno’s most detailed discussion of Hölderlin appears in the essay, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry.” Adorno has been accused of projecting his own philosophical beliefs on Hölderlin. However, I will show that there is valid support in Hölderlin’s poetry as well as in his philosophical and poetological writings to reinforce Adorno’s claim that Hölderlin’s late poetry is striving to give voice to what is traditionally thought (...) to be art’s opposite: nature. The ability of art to mediate nature, and specifically natural beauty, is also of central importance in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and many of the claims of the “Parataxis” essay re-emerge in this later work. (shrink)

This dissertation critically engages the meaning and scope of the category of the ‘essay film’; a term that has gained increasing currency in recent decades in film studies and contemporary art to group a diverse array of moving-image works. Departing from recent literature on the essay film, the essay, as I argue, should be conceived less as a stable generic category, than as a dynamic form and experimental mode of writing and filmmaking, which employs and cuts across diverse literary, cinematic (...) and televisual genres and sub-genres, and which is historically subject to critical transformation as it encounters new social, technological and cultural forms and mediums. The introduction provides a critical survey of some of the leading proponents of the essay film, and outlines a working definition of the essay as a literary and cinematographic form. Chapter 1 examines the history of the essay and criticism as a literary and philosophical form, focusing on the essayistic and critical writings of Michel de Montaigne, the early German Romantics, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Roland Barthes. Central to the critical and experimental nature of the essay, as the chapter underlines, is the deployment of various indirect, allegorical, and modernist rhetorical and poetic strategies and devices – such as citation, irony, fragmentation, and parataxis – which attempt to engage the reader in the text’s reflective process through the constellation of enigmatic and disjunct moments and perspectives. Chapter 2 explores the emergence of various essayistic forms in the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, relating debates around the privileging of literary and photographic documentary montage practices in Soviet Factography to Esfir Shub’s historical compilation films, Dziga Vertov’s experimental newsreels, and Sergei Eisenstein’s project to make a plotless film-essay based on Karl Marx’s Capital. Chapter 3 focuses on Jean-Luc Godard’s film and video essays – from Camera Eye to Histoire du cinéma – delineating the crucial shifts in Godard’s various attempts to present a critical discourse on cinema and the media through the montage of image and sound. Chapter 4 investigates the essay films, archival video essays, and essayistic video installations of Harun Farocki, attending to how his works endeavour to render the ciphered social life of images and the historical transformations in technologies and techniques of seeing and imaging available for critical interpretation. Central to my account of the essay as a literary, cinematographic, and videographic form is the question of compilation; namely, how knowledge and history is archived and assembled through the juxtaposition and critical weighing of disparate citations and images. Paramount in relation to Godard and Farocki, as I underscore, is their respective shifts to working with video technology, which afforded both filmmakers the capacity to more freely combine and analyze images from divergent media sources, as well as to devise novel forms of videographic montage based on the construction of historical correspondences between audio-visual elements. I conclude the dissertation with a consideration of the impact of digital technology on contemporary essayistic audio-visual practices, and how issues raised in the preceding chapters – around audio-visual criticism, the spatialization of montage in moving-image installation work, and documentary and archival film practices – have been affected by such technological and cultural shifts. (shrink)

Through a prolonged engagement with two indispensable works on the critique of energy — Fossil Capital and Capitalism in the Web of Life — Alberto Toscano develops a theory of universal exhaustion, positing a dialectics and tragedy of depletion and exhaustion that points to the limits to both nature and capital.

Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti make the case for the critique of energy by arguing that “the core contradiction of today’s economic system is and always has been tied to its facility with energy.” A critical standpoint on our ongoing economic and ecological crises demands a new historical account of energy.

Responding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Sandeep Banerjee argues that Chakrabarty treats nature as a thing rather than a relation. Reading the Anthropocene as a dialectical relation, Banerjee argues for an emergent “planetary consciousness” where the planet itself becomes the site of the labor/capital struggle.