Abstract
In Chapter 1, it was suggested that the melancholy science of natural history can be understood as a philosophy of waiting-expression. The retrospective projection of Adorno’s reflections on ‘waiting in vain’ back onto the earlier work (including the 1932 lecture) is philologically justified by the reappearance of the idea of natural history in the later work itself. Indeed, the English-language translator of ‘The Idea of Natural History’ observes that Negative Dialectics follows ‘precisely the same plan’ as the lecture — ‘a critique of Heidegger is followed by the presentation of the central concepts of the form of the critique’. This parallel is nevertheless limited by the fact that the last ‘model’ of Negative Dialectics was motivated by the event of a genocide surely not expected back in July of 1932. Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ — ‘after Auschwitz’ — immediately follow the two sub-sections on natural history.1 The last part of Negative Dialectics is in this sense not prefigured in the lecture, but rather can be said to begin where the lecture left off.
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Notes
Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Introduction to Adorno’s “Idea of Natural History”’, in Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural history’, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 1984, p. 103.
Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 124. Hullot-Kentor is thus wrong to suggest, on the basis that it was published posthumously, that Adorno had disowned the lecture.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 353.
Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. by Rolf Tiedemann (Polity Press, 2001), pp. 101, 130.
Cf. Anson Rabinovich, ‘Why Were the Jews Sacrificed? The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment’, New German Critique, 81 (2000), pp. 49–64.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 43.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 546.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 43–4.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (London & New York: Verso Books, 1978), p. 175.
Jacob Taubes found Adorno’s ‘Finale’ to Minima Moralia ‘wonderful, but finally empty’. This forms the basis for Giorgio Agamben’s claim, cited in Chapter 1, that ‘negative dialectics is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought.’ Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. by Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 74.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Volume 4, trans. by Harry Zohn, Howard Eiland, and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 389.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 74.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 228. Translation amended.
Cited in, Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. by Ewald Oders (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 190.
De Beistegui flags-up the central ‘tension’ of the lecture course, between a concept of existence, whose essence is ‘pure time’, and one whose essence is already ‘subordinated to a task which is historical in nature’. For, ‘insofar as Being and Time has already identified the “fundamental meaning” of Dasein as temporality … why must we begin to search for the fundamental meaning of our contemporary Dasein?’. De Beistegui acknowledges that ‘the solution to this tension … will be found only when Heidegger will reformulate the project of the question concerning the sense of being and transform it into the question concerning the history of being.’ The demonstration of this move is ultimately confused, however. As with Löwith’s critique of Heidegger, de Beistegui tends to side with the individual and apolitical Dasein of Being and Time, against any collective or political Dasein whatever — since such a move must be ‘at once too ambitious and naive, too theological and messianic’. In place of messianism, the transition to the history of Being is instead secured for de Beistegui by way of ‘the great works and lecture-courses of the 1930s’ (including, it should be noted, the ‘messianic’ interpretations of Hölderlin). These works seek to reawaken the ‘wonder’ of the Greek Dasein. But such ‘wonder’ already privileges a particular history in a manner that does not account for this privilege with any philosophy of history. Miguel De Beistegui, ‘Boredom: Between Existence and History’, in Thinking With Heidegger (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 61–82.
Heidegger’s 1931 lectures on the Phenomenology are actually directed against interpretations of ‘absolute knowing’ as a totality of knowledge, in favour of ‘ab-solving’. Heidegger relinquishes Hegelian mediation in a manner that will increasingly become a problem for him. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, trans. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Theory of the Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus’, in Supplements, trans. by Roderick M. Stewart and van Buren (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 68.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 102–3.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Progress’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 151.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 107.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 171.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell, trans. by Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 231.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 293.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essay, trans. by William Lovitt (New York & London: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 35.
Martin Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, in Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. by Manfred Stassen, trans. by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 42. Translation amended.
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Phillips, W. (2015). The Expression of Waiting in Vain. In: Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487254_6
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