Adorno and Arendt: Transitional Regimes of Historicity

Through a comparative analysis of their diagnosis of radical evil with the divergent ways in which Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt register and respond to the exhaustion of the modern regime of historicity, this article employs the terminology of historical anthropology as developed by Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog. It proceeds to a retrospective reconstruction of the fashion in which both thinkers stand between the modern and contemporary regimes of historicity by interpreting these diagnoses, precisely in their divergence, as symptomatic of the “crisis of time,” as Hartog puts it, which emerges across the evolution from the former to the latter regime. Adorno and Arendt provide, by virtue of their transitional status, an interesting perspective from which to address the pathological features of the contemporary regime of historicity as identified by Hartog and Hartmut Rosa.