TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

―argumentation is fruitless.‖ The standard mode of philosophical argument – the
statement of an assumption, its development, supplies of proof, and a conclusion –
betrays a naïve faith in the genetic stability of the real and its assumed continuity with
reason. Adorno rejects this faith and finds in the micrological study of things the
generative force for a limited facticity to emerge in finding the concrete dialectical
origins promised by natural history.
Hullot-Kentor, then, in helping us to further set the stage for our apprehension of
Adorno‘s acute reaction to Heidegger and how this reaction effected his understanding of
natural history, also begins to provide us with reason to doubt that the purpose of
Benjamin‘s OGT was to return to the word ―idea‖ its name bearing qualities, in
contradistinction to ―natural history.‖ Motivated to survive Heidegger‘s transcendent
reception in Germany, Adorno developed an argument that sought to demonstrate
Heidegger‘s flaw: ―the conceptual synonymity of myth and nature.‖ Further, Adorno
demonstrates how this synonymity would lead to the ‗neo-ontological‘ (Adorno‘s word
for Heidegger‘s philosophy) repression of the non-organic identities of nature and history
by way of the existential invariables incumbent to Heidegger‘s thought that produced an
essentialism that was akin to Benjamin‘s beliefs about fate. Nonetheless, identity and its
relationship to fate is not such an invariant in Adorno‘s thinking about nature and history.
Adorno‘s critique of the enlightenment, that reason becomes the myth it sought to
replace, begins in his early work on rethinking natural history away from the existential
roots Benjamin granted to the concept.
Hullot-Kentor reminds us of why Adorno‘s break with Benjaminian
existentialism occurred in Adorno‘s reading of Odysseus, a reading that pays special
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