A Theory Devoured by Thought 431Dialectics’ in the winter semester of 1960–1. This criticism remained
true to his original intention of using dialectics to interrogate a philoso-
phy of origins. Adorno attempted to implement a programme of ‘smash-
ing Heidegger’ that Benjamin had conceived as early as 1930.^101 This
intention also underlay Adorno’s Frankfurt lectures and the lectures he
gave at the Collège de France that were in part derived from them. In
June 1959, Adorno wrote to Robert Minder, the French Germanist who
had invited him to Paris, ‘that it would be a good idea to tackle the
entire phenomenon of “Heideggerism” for once in a very principled
way. In order not to do him an honour that in my view he does not
deserve, such a critique should not focus on him and his personality, but
it should be formulated more as a matter of principle.’^102 This means
that Adorno must have distinguished between Heidegger’s philosophy
and what he understood by Heideggerism.
Shortly after his letter to Minder, he started to work on a voluminous
draft for the lecture. He begins his outline with the statement: ‘Chief
motif: that ontology cannot be found to be free of history, and is
not free of history.’^103 Adorno’s intention was to attack Heidegger’s
definition of ontological difference, in other words, his definition of the
relation of being to things that exist. Whereas, according to Heidegger,
existing things can only be experienced by thinking of being, Adorno
tried to derive the question of being from things that exist. Only by
taking the historicity of existing things as the starting-point does it be-
come possible to interpret the tendency to reification, which Heidegger
also diagnoses, in social rather than ontological terms.^104 In his lectures,
Adorno made no attempt to provide a ‘true’ dialectic with which to
refute a ‘false’ ontology – that would be ‘standpoint’ philosophy which
he rejected as a type of thinking that had degenerated to the level
of mere ‘world views’. Instead, he was concerned to mediate between
opposites. ‘I wish to show you’, he said in the first lecture, ‘that the
antagonism between these two philosophies is not unmediated; it is not
like choosing between two different brands, much as you can choose
between the CDU and the SPD. The approach I propose to you is
rationally motivated. It is based not on the arbitrariness of a so-called
decision, but has grown out of the subject matter itself.’^105
Adorno’s criticism developed in the first instance from his study
of Being and Time (1927) and then in connection with Heidegger’s
later volume of essays Holzwege (False Trails) of 1950. His general
objection was that Heidegger constantly regresses to the unhistorical
and the archaic because he has rejected the reduction of primordial
being to existing things. Heidegger’s trick is to ontologize what actually
exists. ‘For example’, he explains in the eighth lecture, ‘the celebrated
formula of man as “the shepherd of being” is an ontic turn of phrase;
that is to say, the attempt to grasp a primordial metaphysical reality
goes back to the primitive, pre-agrarian conditions of a pastoral society
and thus to something very existing, very time-bound – as is well known,