The Expression of Waiting in Vain

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

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.