Despite appearing side by side as keynote speakers at a congress in 1962 devoted to the question of progress, Löwith’s and Adorno’s accounts of progress have never been linked. This paper is an attempt to establish this missed connection, to reveal important connections, striking similarities, and a fundamental difference between these two eminent thinkers’ work on progress. For one, Löwith diagnoses the three main problems that Adorno attempts to solve with his dialectical account of progress. Moreover, each is sympathetic towards (...) crucial aspects of the other’s account: Löwith towards Adorno’s claim that progress is dialectical, Adorno towards Löwith’s claim that progress necessarily has a redemptive aspect. A fundamental disagreement nevertheless divides them: whether the problem of suffering in history is part of our ontological condition, or something we must struggle against and overcome through political action. By establishing this missed connection, I hope to show how progress might still have an important role to play in our present-day historical and political consciousness. (shrink)

It seems natural to suppose that the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology would come to bear at least some affinities or resemblances (whether implicitly or explicitly) to critical theory, insofar as both are deeply concerned with directing a rigorous critical eye towards the most pressing political, economic, cultural, and social issues of our time. Yet critical theory has also had its share of critics of phenomenology itself, not least of which was the foremost member of the first-generation Frankfurt School critical (...) theorists, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s critique of phenomenology was, for historical reasons, confined to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and might be concisely put as follows: for Adorno, classical phenomenology is insufficiently critical towards contemporary realities of oppression and domination (an insufficiency variously attributed to an alleged pernicious idealism, solipsism, methodological individualism, descriptivism, or ahistoricism in classical phenomenology). On this count, critical phenomenologists today may very well agree—at least to the point of affirming that phenomenology’s critical potential remained largely “untapped” in its classical formulations. However, in a twist of historical fate, Adorno failed to engage with a contemporaneous phenomenologist with whom he perhaps had more in common than anyone else: Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas himself was also notably critical of Husserl and Heidegger (while of course also being enormously indebted to them), for reasons not altogether dissimilar to Adorno’s. For Levinas, phenomenology had hitherto neglected the fundamental ethical or moral dimensions of experience—in particular our ethical responsibility towards the Other in the face of the manifold evils and injustices of the world. What might Adorno have thought of Levinas’s work, and Levinas of Adorno’s? What might they have learned from one another? And how might this exchange have affected the trajectories of critical theory, phenomenology, or critical phenomenology? (shrink)

This article discusses the theological implications of Adorno’s writings on Beckett by specifically examining their constellative motifs of death, reconciliation and redemption. It addresses not only their content but also their form, suggesting a mutually stimulating relationship between the two as based both on a negative-dialectical approach and an inverse-theological trajectory. Focusing on Adorno’s discussion of Beckett’s oeuvre as a “metaphysical entity,” I argue that Adorno’s reading of Beckett is peculiar because it is inextricably tied to his own critical-theological venture. (...) The essay claims that Adorno’s reflections on Beckett contour, at their most basic level, meditations on theology in the age of its impossibility. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno’s 1960–1961 lecture course Ontology and Dialectics, recently translated into English, provides the most systematic articulation of his critique of Martin Heidegger. When Adorno delivered three of the lectures at the Collège de France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was reportedly scandalised as he was at that time developing his own ontology, informed by Heidegger. However, this article problematises the assumption that Adorno’s negative dialectic and Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology are incompatible. First, Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology is delineated, with particular focus on (...) how Adorno argues that Heidegger’s subordination of the human being to being is homologous with the logic of capitalism. Then, we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s own engagement with Heidegger, with particular focus on how Merleau-Ponty cannot be accused of denigrating ontic beings. Finally, it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology has the same implications as those which allow Adorno to position his dialectical method as politically opposed to Heidegger’s ontology. (shrink)

This essay considers two concepts of repetition in thinking about canon, the history of ideas, and the work of an opponent, both real and fantastical. I take up these motifs in a variety of figures and cases, but principally in Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of the biblical Abraham in Fear and Trembling, a text rich in interpretive challenges. How might readers in the humanities contend with interpretive rivals while investing in the power of diverse readings? The argument turns on the relationship (...) between the struggle for self‐consciousness, understood through Hegel and Freud as an appointment with otherness, and the work of interpretation, understood as the endeavor to understand others, including other texts, other minds, and one’s own mind. What is the aim of interpretation? How does interpretation fail? To which history of ideas is a reader responsible? (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

Retrieving Realism, by DreyfusHubert and TaylorCharles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 184.

Peter Gordon’s response to Espen Hammer, Gordon Finlayson, and Iain Macdonald.