Abstract:

This project explores the relationship between the themes of mourning and hope in the work of Theodor Adorno and Toni Morrison. Despite vast differences between these two thinkers, I argue that both thinkers confront the traumatic episodes of modern life in ways that inform our vision of religion, ethics, and everyday existence. The writings of Adorno and Morrison exemplify a significant, yet under-analyzed, connection between mourning and hope for a better world. Mourning, in this project, is a helpful category because it brings into focus themes that pervade the writings of Adorno and Morrison--memory of loss, attunement to the suffering of others, and recognition of how traumatic experiences in the past shape and inform the present. Mourning, for these thinkers, contravenes the unhopeful tendency to deny or forget conditions that have produced misery for inhabitants of modernity. It similarly resists insensitivity to suffering, a mode of resistance that is pivotal to the construction of a better world in which more people flourish. In the dissertation, I read Adorno's critique of instrumental reason as a denunciation of practices and modes of thinking that render people less attentive to the pain and suffering of others. I counter the prevailing interpretation of Adorno as a pessimist by highlighting his fidelity to unexplored possibilities within and beyond existing arrangements. Morrison, I argue, similarly develops themes of memory and loss but overcomes Adorno's biases in regard to race, gender, and vernacular culture. I explore how memory of ongoing black suffering in her novels and essays prevents an easy disconnection of past forms of trauma from the present. I contend that she offers a more promising vision of vernacular culture than Adorno, who at times dismisses the potential of ordinary people to resist unjust modes of power. She accomplishes this in her writing by accenting quotidian practices, such as religion, music (particularly jazz and blues), and the sharing of painful stories, that cultivate habits of receptivity toward the suffering of others. Adorno and Morrison ultimately converge, however, on thinking about the possibility of being "at home" in the modern world. For both thinkers, the comfort and familiarity usually associated with the idea of home is interrupted by the unease and pain generated by traumatic events such as the Holocaust or violent arrangements such as chattel slavery.