Reading Shelley and Adorno on “Life”: A Further Exploration

Abstract

ABSTRACTBuilding on a congruent body of opinion, this article provides a fuller exploration of affinities between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Theodor Adorno especially in regard to conceptions of “Life.” Most intriguing of all is the tendency of both Shelley and Adorno to examine “Life” itself and to reflect on the paradoxical failure to “live life” in a post-Enlightenment world. This indicates an existential crisis pre- and post-Auschwitz that is related to the ascendency (or “triumph”) of instrumental reason (calculation for predetermined ends) at the expense of “integral thought,” an outcome which Shelley already observed in “A Defence of Poetry.” The Enlightenment is in question and Bacon (whose emergence almost by default, in Shelley’s largely gloom-ridden “Triumph of Life,” is an instance of Adornian “negative dialectics”) is seen by Shelley as an exemplary figure, a “poet-revolutionary” who breaks free of stultifying epistemological closure by advancing a reciprocal, imaginative approach to protean nature, and to the unlocking of nature’s secrets. In contrast, for Adorno and Horkheimer, Bacon was the modern inaugurator of the Enlightenment’s failed project and its assumption of dominion over nature. In this case, divergent views proposed from a similar perspective offer a conflicting dialogue which yet has strong points of agreement.