Fatal Positivities: Theodor Adorno

Abstract

The place of Theodor Adorno in the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism since Nietzsche is decisive not least because Adorno thinks nihilism in explicit relation to ‘Auschwitz’, a name that, as we shall see, functions in his work as more than a synecdoche for the Nazi extermination of the Jews. However, in a twist that is characteristic of the tradition that is the focus of this book, while the connection that he makes between Auschwitz and nihilism is central to his critique of Heidegger, Adorno nonetheless finds it necessary not only to repeat Heidegger’s gesture of redetermining and redeploying the concept of nihilism, but also, like Heidegger, to turn the charge of nihilism back against the very philosopher from whom he inherits it, while also privileging a certain form of the literary as the most effective form of resistance to nihilism. Just as, in the mid-1930s, Heidegger identifies Nietzsche’s thinking of Being in terms of value as the consummation of nihilism, so Adorno, in Against Epistemology (1954),¹ identifies Heideggerian ontology itself as nihilism:

In Husserl’s pet discussions of the universal plague in which humanity dies off without the slightest danger threatening the phenomenological residuum, viz. the pure ego, one may even perhaps discern preliminary forms of that nihilism of the early Heidegger, which is both hostile to man and pointless, and indulged in being towards death and the negating nothingness. (Adorno 1982a: 189)