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

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

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Hullot-Kentor eloquently makes the motive behind Adorno‘s criticism of the<br />

relationship between alienated commodities and alienated psychological identities<br />

palpable. They each point out that what we believe to be natural is the result of an<br />

accidental alignment of protective self-possession and the real. Identity is its own history.<br />

Fate, as the force of nature within natural history, is an insufficient explanation for the<br />

paradoxes produced by the transitory and dialectical identity of individuals as they<br />

accidentally name themselves in the face of that ―nature.‖<br />

Given this, Adorno felt that natural history could no longer be used to support<br />

portmanteaus like ―Dasein.‖ Adorno would demonstrate in his lecture on natural history<br />

that Heidegger proffered the word in his own nationalistic impulse to replace foreign<br />

terms in philosophy with German ones. In ―Dasein‖ Adorno sees the same kind of<br />

potential for the vitiation of experience and identity signaled by that unforeseeable pun<br />

emitted in Odysseus‘ terrified scream. Adorno argues that the identity of the historical<br />

facts that ―Dasein‖ dissolves – the transitoriness of nature and history – makes of<br />

neologisms only a second degree of linguistic formalism. They are ineffective conduits<br />

for the expression of natural history. That is, words become abbreviations for concepts<br />

that are expressed in their thinker‘s consciousness only. The negative dialectic, and its<br />

reliance upon the name-title relationship, is aimed precisely at de-mythifying the post res<br />

identity of this neo-ontological project and the Idealist predisposition for a nominalistic<br />

verity that completes itself in the accidental structures and substrates of a subjectivity that<br />

is conditioned by the transitoriness of natural history.<br />

Adorno‘s dispute with Heidegger is not simply one of taste. Witness to the<br />

collapse of Kantian ontologies that attempted to still the debate over historical relativism,<br />

173

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