Ebook: Ontology and dialectics: 1960/61

Adorno’s lectures on ontology and dialectics from 1960-61 comprise his most sustained and systematic analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy. They also represent a continuation of a project that Adorno shared with Walter Benjamin – ‘to annihilate Heidegger’. Following the publication of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, and long before his notorious endorsement of Nazism at Freiburg University, both Adorno and Benjamin had already rejected Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.
After his return to Germany from his exile in the US, Adorno became Heidegger’s intellectual counterpart, engaging more intensively with his work than with that of any other contemporary philosopher. Adorno regarded Heidegger as an extremely limited thinker, and for that reason all the more dangerous. In these lectures, he highlights Heidegger’s increasing fixation with the concept of ontology to show that the doctrine of being can only truly be...