Late Nature: Adorno and the Perplexities of Immanent Critique

Nature and human histories are inextricably interwoven. Human interventions into nature have caused a rise in atmospheric temperatures, changes in the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and extensive losses to biodiversity. A new relation to nature is urgently needed, yet the history of nature’s and society’s interweaving cannot be retracted. In this thesis, I elaborate the genesis of Adorno’s account of the warped introversion of nature and history and the fractured lives that it cultivates. From there I examine how he looks to the sphere of autonomous art for exemplary works produced in the artist’s old age that serve as models of how to resist the present destructive alignment of nature and history. Against the grain of Adorno’s own reservations about appealing to pre-scientific naturales historiae, I trace an affinity between his account of the late works of Beethoven, Goethe and Hölderlin and certain elapsed modes of ordering our relation to nature, from the baroque to the Enlightenment. The concept of ‘lateness’, which I excavate from Adorno’s writings on literature and music contributes a methodology of ‘losing oneself in one’s material’ that Adorno describes as immanent critique: boring the object of critique from inside rather than penetrating it from without. Agitating against the objective structures of reification and subjective experiences of alienation from within, Adornoian lateness flouts the now prevalent environmentalist vogue to overcome dualisms at all costs. I argue that his critical approach is mired in the perplexities of an analysis that militates against the distortions of its objects by becoming like them. Yet the danger of replicating the predominant relations to nature without sufficiently contesting them is a risk Adorno knowingly incurs. In his brazen willingness to reproduce capital’s paradoxically divided and conflated (subject/object) terrain, Adorno can approach nature in wonder whilst guarding against the false seductions of otherwise enchanted things