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Adorno and the Problem of Philosophy Stewart Martin Middlesex University PhD Thesis May 2002 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledgea three year full time researchgrant from the Arts and Humanities ResearchBoard (AHRB). ProfessorPeter Osborne,my supervisor, has been an inspiration and invaluable aid from the seminarroom to the bar. Many thanks. Dr. FrancesStracey has been my brilliant accomplice throughout. Thanks for everything, even Leytonstone. 2 Abstract This thesis examines the problem of philosophy in the work of Theodor W. Adorno, in the context of its significance for the idea of Critical Theory and, in particular, in the light of the dominant contemporary obstacle to its revaluation: the criticism of Jürgen Habermas. The thesis attempts to provide a critical elaboration of the concept of philosophy as it is indicated by Adorno, in order to demonstrate its coherence and value as a modem critical discipline, with a continuing and decisive importance for the project of Critical Theory. Chapter 1 introduces the problem of philosophy in Adorno, through demonstrating how Habermas's criticism fails to recognise the precise character of Adorno's engagement with philosophy, and thereby mis-recognises its significance for Critical Theory. Chapter 2 introduces the reassessment of the idea of philosophy in Adorno through an elaboration of the interpretative demands it imposes, revealing its relation to a discourse of metaphilosophy. It elaborates the self-reflective constitution of philosophy. as a form of interpretation which the concept of philosophy is itself subject to, with particular attention to the interpretation of philosophy's obsolescence and need. Chapter 3 elaborates Adorno's understanding of the paradoxical relation of philosophy to the division of labour as a `non-specialist specialism'. It discerns its relation to a set of non-philosophical practices, as dialectical relations of anti-philosophy; and elaborates Adorno's expansive, but critical concept of philosophy as what, after Kant, may be called a `world-concept of philosophising'. Chapter 4 examines the presentation of philosophy in Adorno, elaborating its linguistic medium as it is articulated through the relation of dialectical concepts to their sign and image qualities; and the novel non-dogmatic forms Adorno developed following the French Encyclopaedists, Kant, early German Romanticism and Benjamin. Chapter 5 analyses the peculiar speculative form of Adorno's dialectical concept of philosophy. It demonstrates its relation to the three speculative philosophies most influential to him - those of Kant, Hegel and Benjamin - and examines the conception of metaphysics it generates. Chapter 6 examines the form of time-consciousness that philosophy was to be for Adorno. It elaborates his idea of natural history as an alternative to Hegel's historical conception of philosophy and the critical relation to Benjamin's historiography of truth that informs it. This is developed in relation to its illuminating allusions to Freudian psychoanalysis and the concept of ideology-critique that emerges from the historical interpretation of semblance as an interpretation of truth. 3 Table of Contents Introduction Adorno and the problem of philosophy p.5 Chapter1 Habermas's critique of Critical Theory p.9 Dialectic of Enlightenment as crisis From ideology-critique to independentand totalising critique Theprecipice ofphilosophical modernism Re-philosophization Mimesis as Paradox Excursus: From metaphysics to postmetaphysical thinking Emancipatory interests From emancipation to reconstruction Modernism Chapter 2 Problem p. 50 Programme: interpretation Transformed actuality Obsolescence and need Chapter3 Division of labour p.79 Non-philosophy/anti-philosophy Not science Not art Not Weltanschauung Not praxis World concept of philosophy Excursus: Kant's world-concept ofphilosophy World-conceptofphilosophizing 4 Chapter 4 Presentation p. 118 Language Sign, image, concept Excursus: Kant's critique of dogmatism Anti-System Constellations Ideas Constellation versussub! ation Essay Fragments A new Dictionnairephilosophique A dictionary of fragments Chapter 5 Speculation p. 162 Dialectic of semblance From an organon of semblanceto an organon of absolute knowledge Dialectical and speculative thinking Semblance in speculative logic Reflective judgement Speculative philosophy: Benjamin Metaphysical experience Chapter 6 Time-consciousness p. 198 The idea of natural history Historical metaphysics Absolute modernity and dialectical Mourning Mourning and Melancholia Symptomatic reading of truth Ideology-Critique Art as ideology-critique From Coda I postmetaphysical to metaphysical thinking p.230 Bibliography p.234 5 Introduction Adorno and the problem of philosophy Theodor W. Adorno currently has something of a dual status: apparently outmoded by Jürgen Habermas's attempt to transform Critical Theory, on the one hand; revered as a canonical thinker, on the other. The sides of this split reputation are, of course, not unrelated. Not only has Adorno been valued as an alternative to Habermas, he has also been regarded as a pivotal or transitional figure within modern intellectual culture more generally. ' The concept of philosophy has in many ways been pivotal to Adorno's controversial status and, if this has 2 been only cursorily acknowledged in some of the revisions of Adorno, this recognition has also been notably deepened. This thesis attempts to contribute to this revised view of Adorno's philosophical significance and in a very direct way. It attempts to demonstrate the coherence and value of Adorno's idea of philosophy and to show it to be decisive to the form emancipatory of critique that was the classical preoccupation of Critical Theory -a I This is true of as mutually opposed commentators as Gillian Rose and Habermas himself. See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, `Adorno as the Devil', trans. R. Hurley, Telos vol. 19 (1984/5), pp. 127-37; Gillian Rose, `From Speculative to Dialectic Thinking - Hegel and Adorno' in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Blackwell, Oxford, Cambridge Ma., 1993), pp. 53-64; Interview with Jürgen Habermas by A. Honneth et al, `The Dialectics of Rationalisation' (22 May and 10 July 1981) in Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews ed. P.Dews (Verso, London, New York, 1986) pp. 97-8. 2 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (Freedom Press, New York, 1977). Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (Macmillan, London, 1978). Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso, London and New York, 1990). 3 See for instance J.M. Bernstein's The Fate ofArt: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992); Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (Routledge, London, New York, 1995); and Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 2001). See also, Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998). 6 contention that was common to Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse - and to defend it against its marginalisation by Habermas.This is its point of departurein Chapter 1. Critical Theory presentsa dual concernwith philosophy, on the one hand, and various social sciences,on the other.4 But the acknowledgementof this dualism tends to deepenrather than to clarify the problem of how the idea of philosophy was itself transformedin this process.It is therefore liable to lead to an isolation of philosophy from the social sciences,which has been a feature of post-HabermasianCritical Theory. This thesis attemptsto counter this marginalisation by elaboratingthe idea of philosophy as it emergesfrom Adorno's writings. It is the sustaineddirectness of the reading of Adorno's idea of philosophy that distinguishesthis thesis from other comparableendeavours. My concern here is with the problem of philosophy in Adorno, and only in this regard is it about whatever may be assumedto be properly philosophical problems. It is therefore distinct from the preoccupation 5 with Adorno's philosophy as an aestheticsor philosophy of art. Art is of course fundamental to his conceptof philosophy, yet it is also characteristicof the post-Habermasian transformation of Critical Theory to marginalize the problem of philosophy in Adorno as the 4 `The oppositional movement of Critical Theory is refined as it engages with its philosophical (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche) and social scientific (Marx, Weber and Freud) sources, finding and transforming a tradition of thought for itself, and then at a later stage, self-consciously transformatively reworking its Reflections Nihilism own history. ' J.M. Bernstein, `Critical Theory - The Very Idea: on and Domination' Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (Routledge,London, New York, 1995), pp. 11-12. As it appearsin Bernstein, The Fate ofArt: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Seealso Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty ofArt: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. N. Solomon, (MIT Press,Cambridge Ma., London, 1998). In many respectsMenke pursuesthe Habermasianreading that Albrecht Wellmer has developed.See for instance, Albrecht Wellmer's `Truth, Semblance,reconciliation: Adorno's Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity' in The Persistence of Modernity: Essayson Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernismtrans. D. Midgley (MIT Press,
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