Benjamin Randolph

Waiting for Godot’s many commentators have emphasized the absurdity of hope in the play, but there has not been an account of how the play reprises hope’s historical transformation and weakening in modernity. This essay provides that account, arguing that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sponsors a form of hope appropriate to the predicaments of modern societies. Godot stages the blockage of hope by reflecting the obsolescence and fragmentation of the religious and progressive legitimations for the concept that used to be broadly convincing. Despite this blockage, however, Godot does not give in to nihilism. It, rather, models a form of responsible, self-aware hope appropriate to a historical situation where hope does not admit of rational justification. To develop this interpretation of the play and to defend its minimalist conception of hope, the essay draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and aesthetics.

This dissertation reconstructs and defends Theodor W. Adorno’s original conception of hope. I show that Adorno belongs to a tradition in modern philosophy of revising the concept of hope so that it fits the assumptions and expectations of individuals in modern society. I call this process of revision the “secularization of hope,” since the changes to the concept correspond to the general trends of secularizing societies. Adorno, however, argues that there are fundamental impasses to secularizing hope. Traditionally, hope was a religious conception that assured a just and happy condition with reference to an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God. Modern philosophers, such as Hegel and Marx, attempt to absorb this religious conception into a theory of historical progress, according to which we may hope for a just and rational world because humanity’s historical development progresses toward greater justice and rationality. Adorno argues that not only is it impossible for the progressive conception to absorb the religious conception; the two conceptions, in fact, depend on each other to be plausible. Adorno’s novel approach to hope turns on showing how the progressive and religious conceptions are reciprocally conditioning but irreducible to each other. The dissertation develops this conception of hope according to Adorno’s “negative dialectic.” It first shows the insufficiency of a freestanding progressive conception. It then examines failed philosophical efforts to assimilate the progressive and religious conceptions. Finally, it presents Adorno’s original account in which the two conceptions condition each other yet cannot be reconciled into a unified concept of hope. This yields a fallibilistic concept of hope that promises, but does not guarantee, that human beings can create a just, meaningful, and happy world.

This essay presents a systematic reconstruction of the problem of divine providence in Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. I argue that reading Thoughts and Sentiments in this frame allows interpreters to take Cugoano at his word without compromising on the religious and political sophistication of his argument. Cugoano, I show, develops an innovative account of providence’s relationship to slavery by engaging both contemporary apologies for slavery and abolitionist arguments for divine retribution. His theory of providence accounts for slavery as a social inequality as well as the difficulty of making restitution for modern slavery.

Waiting for Godot’s many commentators have emphasized the absurdity of hope in the play, but there has not been an account of how the play reprises hope’s historical transformation and weakening in modernity. This essay provides that account, arguing that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sponsors a form of hope appropriate to the predicaments of modern societies. Godot stages the blockage of hope by reflecting the obsolescence and fragmentation of the religious and progressive legitimations for the concept that used to be broadly convincing. Despite this blockage, however, Godot does not give in to nihilism. It, rather, models a form of responsible, self-aware hope appropriate to an historical situation where hope does not admit of rational justification. To develop this interpretation of the play and to defend its minimalist conception of hope, the essay draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and aesthetics.

As genealogy has gained greater disciplinary recognition over the last two decades, it has become increasingly common to call any historically oriented philosophy, such as Theodor W. Adorno’s, “genealogy.” In this article, I show that Adorno’s philosophy indeed performs genealogy’s defining functions of “problematization” and “possibilization.” Moreover, it does so in unique ways that constitute a significant contribution to genealogical practice. Adorno’s method, here called “tragic genealogy,” is particularly well-suited to the genealogical analysis of traditional philosophical problems and to the critical reanimation of declining, but ethically significant, values. Nevertheless, I also argue that Adorno’s philosophy cannot be assimilated into genealogical practice without rejecting or revising some of its Hegelian influences, particularly its philosophy of history and its modal metaphysics.