Josh Robinson

Roger Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

In his discussion of the speculative moment of Adorno’s philosophy, Simon Jarvis makes the case for a “phenomenology of affect [that] might, if we can imagine this, owe at least as much to Proust as to Husserl”.1 Foster’s study of the status and consequences of the category of “spiritual experience” in Adorno’s work might perhaps be seen as the first attempt to provide the foundations for such a phenomenology. It investigates the discrepancy between the mutilated and to an extent evacuated constituting subject of scientific rationality – a constituting subject that, for Foster, presupposes the mutilation of experience, the “repression of subjectivity” (pp. 10–11) – and what Adorno terms “spiritual experience”, the “counterconcept to the withering of experience” (p. 5), central to the complete subject that would be necessary for the experience of objectivity.2 This would be a conception of experience no longer constrained by the limits imposed on it by conceptuality, but rather what Adorno variously terms the “communication of the incommunicable”,3 of the “non-communicative”4 or of the “differentiated”.5 Following Adorno, Foster considers this attempt to recover experience as a striving to “break out” of constitutive subjectivity, and offers sensitive and nuanced readings of Adorno’s critique of two previous attempts at such an “outbreak”, those of Husserl and of Bergson. Adorno’s objection is not

Dialektik und Spekulation. Über die Grenzen der spekulativen Vernunft

In ihrem Aufsatz ‚From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking’ deutet Gillian Rose auf Hegels dreifaltiges Schema des Denkens hin, das er in einer Beilage zu einem Brief an Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer darlegte. Nach Hegel habe der philosophische Inhalt „drei Formen; 1) ist er abstrakt, 2) dialektisch, 3) spekulativ; abstrakt, insofern er im Elemente des Denkens uberhaupt ist; aber blos abstrakt, dem Dialektischen und Spekulativen gegenuber, ist er das sogenannte Verstandige, das die Bestimmungen in ihren festen Unterschieden festhalt und kennen lernt. Das Dialektische ist die Bewegung und Verwirrung jener festen Bestimmtheiten, – die negative Vernunft. Das Spekulative ist das positiv-Vernunftige, das Geistige, erst eigentlich Philosophische“ (Hegel 1812c: 830, Herv. i. O.). Das eigentlich Spekulative sei „die Erkenntnis des Entgegengesetzten in seiner Einheit; – oder genauer, das die Entgegengesetzten in ihrer Wahrheit Eins sind“ (ebd.: 831).