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)

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)

‘Natural-History’ is one of the key concepts in the thought of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, appearing from his very earliest work through to his very last. Unfortunately, the existing literature provides little illumination as to what Adorno’s concept of natural-history is, or what it is supposed to do. This paper thus seeks to supply the required understanding. Ultimately, I argue that ‘natural-history’ is best understood as a sort of ‘therapeutic’ concept, intended to dissolve certain philosophical anxieties (...) which might otherwise present obstacles to our being able to obtain a critical-theoretical understanding of reality. (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)