Interpretation and history in Adorno: transience as a moral category

Abstract

This research project aims at the relationship between interpretation and natural history in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. While it is more common to circumscribe such relationship stating that interpretation must liberate history that has sedimented in objects, thus denaturalizing them, our project aims a less studied dimension of the problem, namely the roled played by the category of transience [Vergängnis], which plays a central role for the concept of natural history offering the "canon of historical-philosophical interpretation". Its about the intersection between metaphysics and history, where the notion of decline [Verfall] is central. The project seeks to show that, once the inexorable course of history is conceived by Adorno as the permanent catastrophe - which renders problematic even dialectical conceptions of history -, interpretation turns to things that have perished and remained at the edge of history, constituting what Adorno calls "the blind spots of dialectics". Transience has a normative or moral dimension, that can be formulated as solidarity with the victims of history, of which the idea of the salvation of the hopeless [Rettung des Hoffnungslosen] is the most enduring expression. In this way, philosophical interpretation must proceed as a secularization of a metaphysical and theological attitude towards history, or even as a "secularization of melancholy", as Adorno puts it in his lessons on history and freedom. It is argued that this aspect is very important for Adornos reflections of philosophy of history, although it has not yet received the attention it deserves. (AU)