Andrzej Frelek

This article argues for the value inherent in rereading Theodor Adorno’s 1962 essay “Progress,” placing his thoughts in the context of the climate crisis and arguing for the necessity of retaining a form of negative hope in critical theory. First, the article retraces his analysis of the relation between history and catastrophe, itself indebted to the writings of Walter Benjamin. Second, the article shows how Adorno relates the aforementioned idea to the historical genealogy of philosophies of progress and their theological inheritance. Third, the article focuses on his critical reworking of the concept of progress and its relation to the dialectic of freedom and unfreedom. Finally, the article attempts to place Adorno’s ideas in the context of the dangers posed by the climate crisis, showing that his thought remains extremely relevant to the present historical situation.

This chapter discusses the concept of natural history within Marx’s Capital and Adorno’s essay The Idea of Natural History. By analyzing the role of the titular concept in the chosen source material, the author attempts to rethink the relation of nature and society as dialectical, beyond crude dualisms and antagonisms. The first part focuses on the links between the value-form and coercion in capitalist society. The production for the sake of value is presented as a falsely naturalized mode of impersonal domination that necessitates submission to irrational social relations, which in turn is based on the universal threat of dispossession. In the second part, Adorno’s analysis of the concept of natural history is analyzed to push this argument further. His critique of ontology, supplemented with his reading of Walter Benjamin, is presented as an attempt to uncover the ways in which the concepts of history and nature are interrelated in social consciousness. This reading proposes second nature to be a mimicry of first nature that prolongs natural modes of domination. In its conclusions, the chapter aims to make apparent the necessity of coming to a social consciousness of the obscured mediation between society and nature.