The glance of the essay: Adorno and Benjamin on essayistic writing and natural-historical thinking

Abstract

For Adorno, the conditions of possibility of philosophical thought strongly hang together with its modes of expression (Ausdruck), or put differently, its aesthetic forms. The form of the essay was, for him, the medium of philosophical critique par excellence. Not only did he write many essays himself, but he also reflected and commented on the essay form throughout his oeuvre. This paper looks at how Adorno developed his ideas on philosophical essayistic writing in dialogue with and in response to Walter Benjamin, his friend and mentor. First of all, I look at Adorno's A portrait of Walter Benjamin, which contains some of Adorno's earliest reflections on the essay as form. Next, I explore how several of Adorno's characterizations of Benjamin return in The essay as form, which can be considered as his most programmatic text, and the theory of essayism he sets out there. In the final section, the "actuality" (another key term in Adorno's writings) of the essay is considered in our own time, by relating it to issues of climate change and by exploring the possibility of the "planetary essay". This notion, inspired by Adorno and Benjamin and complemented by authors like Spivak and Ghosh, entails that a more reciprocal relation to nature requires different modes of thought, and therewith, different expressions of thought.