ABSTRACT
In the recent debates on ecology, Theodor Adorno’s name resurfaces very rarely, despite the fact that his late thought is concerned almost uniquely with the idea of reconciliation with nature. This chapter will attempt to reconstruct Adorno’s variation on the Hegelian theme of reconcilement (Versöhnung) as very different from the idea of return to nature, and because of that as a unique – perhaps even the most convincing – solution to the problem of the antagonism between humankind and natural life. In contrast to the post-humanist position, here associated with Martin Heidegger’s famous ‘turn,’ this chapter calls Adorno’s unfinished project a form of ‘neo-humanism’ and explains it through the famous quote from Emmanuel Lévinas, according to which “a little humanity distances us from nature, a great deal of humanity brings us back.” The Zohar, the early kabbalistic Book of Splendor, describes the gesture of wiping away the tears of Esau – the biblical emblem of natural life – as the necessary precondition of redemption, envisaged as a reunion of the conflicted principles of nature and civilization, sensual and spiritual life. In this chapter, it emerges as the best metaphor (perhaps even an inspiration) of Adorno’s philosophical strategy. The chapter attempts to show that his reconcilement with nature does not aim at the atonement/at-one-ment, which would annul the anthropological difference, but at the ethical act of giving justice to nature understood as the Lévinasian other.
