Abstract
Ever since Adorno was reproached by his students in the late 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has been accused of resignation.1 By determining contemporary society as totally reified, the charge goes, Adorno’s critical theory thereby denies its own agency for social change (to reify means to turn subjectivity into a thing). Adorno had already defined his project as ‘the melancholy science’, the only possible philosophy amidst conditions of ‘damaged life’ — and does not melancholy suggest resignation?2 Adorno’s more recent detractors have included Italian radical thinkers. For Antonio Negri (writing with Michael Hardt), Adorno’s critical theory represents a form of ‘deconstruction’ at a time when what is required is ‘constructing, in the non-place, a new place.’3 And for Giorgio Agamben, ‘negative dialectics is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought, closer to the emotional tonality of Jean Améry than that of Benjamin.’4 What these statements share is the old charge of a decisive abstraction of theory from practice, understood here as construction and messianic event respectively.
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Notes
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 289.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (London & New York: Verso Books, 1978), p. 15.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 217.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 38.
Gillian Rose, ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking — Hegel and Adorno’, in Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 61.
Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 27.
Theodor W. Adorno, Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 15.
Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. ix.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. Papers on Metapsychology and Other Words, trans. by James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), xiv, p. 245.
Rose would later distinguish between mourning and melancholy in her unfinished, posthumously published Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 312.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 461.
Or, the ‘spurious infinity’, since the infinite ‘straight line’ is an infinity (the mathematical infinity) but not the absolute infinity. Kant’s distinction between a mathematical and a philosophical infinity does not pre-empt Hegel’s attack. Negative, indefinite infinity (an ‘indeterminately continued regress’) is contrasted with the positive, mathematical infinity. The former names the non-finitude that accompanies the finite conditioned, negatively. But this throws Kant back onto the antinomy, and its infinite insolubility. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. by A. V. Miller (London: Humanity Books, 1969), p. 149.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by Richard Taft, 5th edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 193.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 209.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso Books, 1998), p. 27. Translation amended.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Music, Language and Composition’, in Essays on Music, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 113.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), pp. 116–7. Hullot-Kentor translates ‘Sprachcharakter’ both as ‘articulation’ and as ‘linguistic quality’.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pt. II, 1–3.
Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 112.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 395.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. by C. J Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p. 51.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3, trans. by Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 88.
J. W. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, ed. by Peter Hutchinson, trans. by Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 16.
‘In adulthood, he stretched the sphere of the comprehensible, which he continued to reach out to. In maturity, the feeling of an impenetrability of the actual won more power over his soul once again. This is the natural course of middle age [Lebensalters]’. Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Aus Der Zeit Der Spinoza-Studien Goethes’, in Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, Gesammelte Schriften (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), ii, p. 394.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘Principles of Nature and Grace’, in Philosophical Essays, trans. by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989), p. 212.
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), p. 48.
Bram Mertens, Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).
Cf. Wesley Phillips, ‘History or Counter-Tradition? The System of Freedom After Walter Benjamin’, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory, 11 (2010), 99–118.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 64.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History’, in The New Schelling, trans. by Nick Midgley and Judith Norman (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 64–5.
F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters’, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. by Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 223.
Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 89.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting’, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly, 1995, p. 77.
F. W. J. Schelling, ‘Stuttgart Seminars’, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F. W. J. Schelling, trans. by Thomas Pfau (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 242.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationships of Philosophy and Music’, in Essays on Music, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 140.
Slavoj Žižek and F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World (University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 125.
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, trans. by Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 55–6.
Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. by Lucio Colletti, trans. by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 422.
Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. by Frederick G. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 67–8.
Alfred Schmidt, Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 9.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 1984, p. 122.
Hegel was equally dismissive of the Freiheitschrift, though this time on methodological grounds: ‘Schelling has made known a single treatise on freedom. It is of a deep speculative nature, but it stands alone. In philosophy, a single piece cannot be developed.’ Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism: The Horizons of Feeling (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 142.
In his Differenzschrift (1801), Hegel states that, to speak of a ‘limited’ moment of reflection only becomes meaningful with respect to the ‘connection’ of reflection to ‘the Absolute’, as a totality of connections. There is no limit to infinite reflection. For Hegel, reflection, or rather reason, now connects the limited to the whole in a manner that determines both: ‘reflection nullifies itself and all being and everything limited, because it connects [the limited] with the Absolute. But at the same time the limited gains standing precisely on account of its connection with the Absolute’. These (Spinozist) claims are only substantiated in the Phenomenolgy to the extent that the absolute remains a postulation here in the Differenzschrift. Hegel needs the phenomenology of (re)cognition in order to break out of the solipsistic shell of subjective reflection, critically. G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. by Walter Cerf (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 94.
Cf. Wesley Phillips, ‘The Future of Speculation?’, Cosmos and History, 8 (2012), 289–303.
Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’, in The Utopian Function of Art, trans. by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 1–17.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 28.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. by Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 62–3; 152f.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, trans. by David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, and Ian Balfour (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 179. Translation amended.
Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. by Roger Lustig (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 1–17.
Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p.92.
Eduard Hanslick, ‘“Content” and “Form” in Music’, in German Essays on Music, ed. by Jost Hermand and Michael Gilbert, trans. by Geoffrey Payzant (New York & London: Continuum, 1994), p. 84.
Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau’, in Blindness & Insight (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 132–3.
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 222.
James Hodkinson, ‘The Cosmic-Symphonic: Novalis, Music, and Universal Discourse’, in Music and Literature in German Romanticism, ed. by Siobhán Donovan and Robin Eliott (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), p. 13.
F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. by Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 109.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. by Robert Latta (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 250.
Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. by Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 101.
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. by Wesley V. Bloomster and Anne G. Mitchell (London: Sheed & Ward, 1973), p. 85.
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Phillips, W. (2015). Melancholy Science as Dissonant System. In: Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487254_2
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