Adorno’s Negative Dialectics with Bataille: Poisoning the Absolute
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-7210.15369Abstract
My paper has two basic aims: Primarily, I illustrate Theodor Adorno’s critique of Hegelian ‘totality.’ Secondarily, I outline a connection between the thought of Adorno and Georges Bataille. Briefly stated, I explore how the efforts of both thinkers “recommence and undo Hegel’s Phenomenology,” to borrow a line from Bataille. My paper has three basic moves. First, I outline the problem of ‘totality,’ or why the ‘Whole is false.’ Second, I outline the means of totality’s disruption, or how totality poisons itself. Here, Bataille offers his poisonous services as I explore the usefulness of that which is wholly without use to Hegel: abstract negativity. And finally, I outline Adorno’s constructive analytic solution to the ‘fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ in the form of the constellation.References
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, (New York, NY.: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1973), 337.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York NY.: Zone Books, 1998), 31.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, (Albany, NY.: State University of New York Press, 1988), 150.
Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, trans. Rodney Livingstone, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 288.
Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy A Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago, IL.: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 255.
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.
Max Horkheimer, Theodor, W., Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 119.
Karl Marx, “Capital,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling, (New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 2001), 464.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, (New York, NY.: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1958), 51.
Downloads
Published
Versions
- 2008-04-24 (2)
- 2008-04-24 (1)
