/lit/ - Literature

>>17037093
Faggot looks like he founded the transgender industrial complex.

>>12192327
forgot the pic

Only real Adorno / Hegel / dialectical heads in this thread.

I'm reading Adorno's lecture series on metaphysics. The kind of real juicy promise of the whole course is that he says he will go into how Auschwitz (as a symbol for all the unspeakable, meaningless atrocity of the modern social world) has fundamentally changed metaphysics. It has changed metaphysics by making the idea of an absolute, ideal meaning behind the mere material historical world— which implicitly justifies that world—an impossible or blasphemous position to hold.

But what's difficult for me is that Adorno insists that he's saying more than just that Auschwitz allowed people to *realise* the idea of metaphysical meaning is a lie. He seems to be saying that Auschwitz actually changed the things metaphysics deals with, which implies that metaphysics wasn't just "plausible" or "meaningful" for Aristotle etc. while all the time covering up the meaninglessness that Auschwitz eventually exposed, but was actually somehow true.

But if metaphysics is untrue now, doesn't that mean it was always untrue? Otherwise Adorno is just doing a kind of history-of-thought in which philosophy is one way of narrating one's historical moment. In which case, metaphysics was only ever an obfuscated way of representing the coherence of ancient Greek society as it appeared to its elite intellectual-workers.

I realise that I'm only finding this problematic because Adorno's ideas of the historicity and the dynamism of truth are very unintuitive and complex, and his whole point is that there are philosophical truths that don't deal with the immutable and extra-temporal, but could anyone with any experience of these ideas spell things out a bit more?

For Adorno, I think reading Hegel is more important than Marx. As for Benjamin, a good background in phenomenology would be helpful.