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September 29, 2007
Adorno's 'monadological viewpoint' is a micrological interpretation of life's fragments -- the melancholic memory of the dead and otherwise suppressed moments of human suffering. These fragments preserved the force of the concrete particular against the power of the abstract universal.
The paragraph below is from a review of Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, (2006), by David Ingram:
The lecture on negative universal history contains a very close reading of Thesis XVII of Walter Benjamin's renowned late masterpiece, "On the Concept of History" (which appears in the English volume Illuminations under the title "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), a work to which Adorno -- perhaps too generously -- credits with having encapsulated the core of his own philosophy of history. According to Adorno, if we follow Benjamin in interpreting history from the standpoint of the vanquished rather than from the standpoint of the victorious (who see themselves as the culminating endpoint of a logic that extends throughout all history), we will see each catastrophe as a singular constellation of possibilities -- the defiant acts of the crushed individual in the face of the overwhelming machinery of rational domination -- that open up a messianic rupture within history understood as the mythical return of the same.
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