Mr Amir-Hooshang Eftekhari-Rad

Research project: The Problem of the Duality of Time in the Context of Adorno's Negative Dialectics

Abstract

My PhD research addresses the notion of time in Adorno's idea of negative dialectics. This involves the duality of time which Adorno refers to in his book, Negative Dialectics. But what is the duality of time? The duality of time – the dichotomy of temporality and eternity, and the problem of what Adorno calls temporalization and detemporalization – punctuates the movement of Negative Dialectics. Adorno scholars have paid little attention to this problem, and researchers working on the philosophy of time have yet to take note of Adorno's interventions in this field. This duality is a gap within Negative Dialectics. In Negative Dialectics while Adorno deals with the phenomenological ontology of Heidegger's Being and Time to a considerable extent, he does not deal in depth with the notions of time and temporality which are the horizon of being for Heidegger. In order to reach at a new meaning of being which is emphatically differentiated from beings, which Heidegger talks about, Heidegger criticizes the common conception of time by giving a primacy to primordial time, making a new kind of duality of time. In keeping with the idea of a negative dialectics, Adorno must deal with the duality of time which he refers to in the very few pages of his book. But what will happen to the duality of time in a negative dialectics? In an attempt to answer this question, the thesis is constructed through three areas of research: 1) a critical (re-)construction of the idea of negative dialectics; 2) an excavation of the philosophy of time, especially, in order to show how the dualities of time are formed and expounded; and 3) an examination of how theories of time may engage with negative dialectics.