Adorno and Benjamin

This dissertation examines the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin in critical constellation with German Idealism, specifically G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling. I explore how Adorno and Benjamin deconstruct and refashion Idealist notions, while also providing the post-Idealist theoretical armature to read Idealism in speculative directions. Through this mosaic, I pose questions regarding the actuality of philosophy, considering how thought might open itself towards a fuller spectrum of experience, while nonetheless remaining systematic, creating new (inter)disciplinary models of philosophy which tarry with the para-philosophical domains of art and nature. In the first part of this project, I provide a critical exegesis of Adorno, whom I locate as a fundamentally “post-Idealist” thinker, one who works through, while extending, German Idealism’s central problematics. I elaborate Adorno’s impossible hope for philosophy in relation to crisis, elaborating ruin, conflict, and “natural history” as the motivating elements of Adorno’s negative dialectic. I then survey Adorno’s contestation of philosophy’s absolute autarky by way of disciplinary conflicts with sociology and psychoanalysis, along with the ur-conflict Adorno opens between philosophy and artaesthetics. The second part of this project takes up the early writings of Benjamin (~1928), whom I position as elaborating an expanded, though nonetheless transcendental, philosophy of experience via a meta-critical expansion of the Kantian program into the domain of language (which comes to be understood in a mimetic and medial sense).Though Benjamin’s attempts to found a novel “coming philosophy” began with Kant, the limitations of the (neo) Kantian epistemic conception of philosophy led Benjamin to enter the “force-field” of post-Kantian Idealism, developing his own mortuary romantic conception of philosophy, via the speculative potentiation of the Frühromantiker, Goethe, and the Baroque poets. In summation, I present a reading of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel centering on notions of allegory and natural history, ideas which provide the foundational contours of his natural-historical philosophy of transience. Part three of this project takes up the work of Schelling and Hegel respectively, thinkers whom I read “without absolutes,” that is, as theorists that problematize the final unity of philosophy by way of nature and aesthetics. I explore Schelling as a thinker for whom the “original diremption” of nature continually troubles the constancy of thought, resulting in a negative dialectical mode of organization in which autonomous members threaten any possible philosophical system. My final chapter elaborates my own ruined reading of Hegel, which methodologically follows the (Hegelian) interventions of Bataille. I elevate nature and aesthetics as “phantasmatic domains”—or prisms—which can be employed to productively refract the Hegelian program, reading his (supposedly) panlogicist corpus against the grain.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

For the intellectuals, the philosophers and the priests, the Word has always been favoured over the Image. Since Plato's parable of the cave of shadows helping to enslave the credulous, the Image has been associated with in-authenticity, manipulation, the transient and contingent, the feeble-minded and the masses. There has been a theological dimension to this distaste for the Image. For Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, the image, which is by definition a finite thing, is singularly ill-equipped to represent something as infinite as God (Hobbes 2006: 34-5). Hence the prohibition on Graven Images in the Jewish religion. The Word by contrast seemed to belong to the Mind, not matter that could decompose, it was Universal not particular, its written manifestation belonged for a long time as the exclusive property of the ruling classes. In this context the Image threatened in effect to transfer the property of the ruling class – its cognitive concepts and moral ideas – to the masses in a form they can master. For Benjamin, this was one of the implications of the increasing mechanical reproduction of art in the twentieth century: 'the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition…in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced' (Benjamin 1999a: 215). In the meantime, publishing, mass democracy and mass education changed the Word from a mere instrument of ruling class power to a site of struggle between classes. But it is still an uneven struggle in which the written Word especially continues to exude class conditions.

A Companion To Adorno (ed. Peter Gordon and Espen Hammer), 2020

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno’s theory of “non-identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought.

Political Theory, 1997

The influence of the thought of the great German Idealist philosopher G.W.F Hegel on the thought of Theodor Adorno, the leading thinker of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, is unmistakeable, and has been the subject of much commentary. Much less discussed, however, is the influence of Hegel’s prominent contemporary, F.W.J. Schelling. This article investigates the influence of Schelling on Adorno, and the sometimes striking parallels between fundamental motifs in the work of both thinkers. It argues that Adorno’s critique of Hegelian (and indeed of his own, negative) dialectics, his conception of the relation between nature and spirit, and his philosophy of history (amongst other aspects of this thought) owe a considerable debt to Schelling. Furthermore, when adequately explicated, Schelling’s position on a range of problems which confronted German Idealist philosophy often prove intrinsically preferable to those of Hegel.

Aktuel forskning. Litteratur, kultur og medier 2015, 2015

The purpose of this paper is to outline a possible approach to Benjamin’s figure of the dialectical image from the perspective of neither its content nor the philosophical issues it is supposed to represent but from the very dialectical tension immanent in it. I believe it is precisely due to that inner tension that the dialectical image conveys truth content as the eternal glimmer of transiency.

In this paper, I synthesize the concept of the redemption of time and history as articulated by Walter Benjamin in his “On the Concept of History,” and Erich Auerbach, in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature with the concept of “truth content” in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. I have selected a section of Auerbach’s book that relates the technique of Marcel Proust in order to show that Auerbach’s historicist approach to literature can be brought into line with Benjamin’s historical materialist idea of redemption and utopia, by way of Theodor Adorno’s idea of an art work’s truth content. The aim of my paper is to indicate that regardless of the historical methodology, both Auerbach and Benjamin can be reconciled, via Adorno, to the expression of utopia in Proust as evidence of his historical situation. My main point is that the truth content of Proust’s narrator’s situation becomes clear through Auerbach’s analysis of it—namely, that the novel form is shown to be inhibitive of the content: the relating of a human story. Proust’s master work, and Auerbach’s interpretation of the author’s utopic ideals, expresses the tension, often indicated by historical materialism, between an individual’s non-linear experience of the past and the so-called objective reality of a universal, standardized, external time.

This paper explores the transformation which Adorno's conception of history undergoes from his texts of the 1930s to those of the 1960s. This transformation involves a change in the role played by Hölderlin's figure of transience. In the texts of the '30s, Hölderlinian transience (in its Benjaminian interpretation) amounts to a moment of negative content within Adorno's conception of history. In the texts of the '60s, such transience becomes the very form of Adornian philosophical history. As such, his thinking of history changes from a tragic conception (emphasizing a "negative absolute") to an iconoclastic one (emphasizing "absolute negativity").