Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-c654p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-04T02:42:05.201Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE BOUNDED LIFE: ADORNO, DICKENS, AND METAPHYSICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Helen Small
Helen Small
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

THEODOR ADORNO'S LATE LECTURES on Metaphysics propose a “shocking thesis”: “metaphysics began with Aristotle” (15). A “doubly shocking” thesis, Adorno tells his audience, because it gives credit where credit is not usually given, and declines to give it where most students of philosophy would understand that it belongs–with Plato (18). The Platonic doctrine of Ideas misses the essential criterion for metaphysics. Plato never fully accepted that the tension between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of “direct experience” is not merely an adjunct of metaphysical inquiry but its defining subject matter (18). Aristotle understood this, and understood also that metaphysics has always a “twofold aim”; for, even as Aristotelian metaphysics criticizes Plato's attempt to define essence in opposition to the world of the senses, it tries to “extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it.” True metaphysics, Adorno claims, is an effort to go beyond thought in the very act of defining the boundaries of thought. In his words, it is “the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys” (20).

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN BOUNDARIES
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , September 2004 , pp. 547 - 563
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno Theodor W. “An Address on Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop.” (“Rede über den Raritätenlanden von Charles Dickens”). Trans. Michael Hollington. Dickens Quarterly 6.3 (1989): 96–101. Rpt. in Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1991–92. References are to Notes to Literature, unless stated otherwise.
Adorno Theodor W. 2000 Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP
Adorno Theodor W. 1998 Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag
Adorno Theodor W. 1973 Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum
Adorno Theodor W. “Rede über den Raritätenlanden von Charles Dickens.” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt. 18 April 1931. 1– 2 (1b).
Bowen John, 2000. Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Oxford: Oxford UP
Dickens Charles. 1965–2002. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Pilgrim edition. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, et al. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P,
Dickens Charles. 1997. Master Humphrey's Clock and Other Stories. Ed. Peter Mudford. London: J. M. Dent
Dickens Charles. 1997. The Old Curiosity Shop. Ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan. Oxford: Clarendon P
Hollington Michael. 1989: “Adorno, Benjamin and The Old Curiosity Shop.” Dickens Quarterly 6. 3 89– 95.Google Scholar
Jameson Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso
Jarvis Simon. 1998. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity P
Leslie Esther. “Walter Benjamin and the Cheerful Destruction of the Self.” <http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/cheerful.html>.
Litvak Joseph. 2001: “Adorno Now.” Victorian Studies 44. 1 33– 39.Google Scholar
Poole Adrian. 2000: “The Shadow of Lear's ‘Houseless’ in Dickens.” Shakespeare Survey 52 103– 13.Google Scholar
Shakespeare William. 1998. King Lear. The Complete Works. Rev. ed. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon P
Sturgis Jon. 1991: “Little Nell: The Monster with Two Heads.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 293– 314.Google Scholar
Tiedemann Rolf. “Editor's Afterword.” Metaphysics. By Theodor Adorno. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP 191– 98.
Welsh Alexander, 1984. “King Lear, Père Goriot, and Nell's Grandfather.” Literary Theory and Criticism: Festschrift Presented to René Wellek in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday. Vol. 2. Ed. Joseph P. Strelka. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1405– 25.