Adorno held that metaphysics must now confront bodily materiality and waste

Evidence

The point of no return has been reached in the process which irresistibly forced metaphysics to join what it was once conceived against. Not since the youthful Hegel has philosophyunless selling out for authorized cerebrationbeen able to repress how very much it slipped into material questions of existence. Children sense some of this in the fascination that issues from the flayer’s zone, from carcasses, from the repulsively sweet odour of putrefaction, and from the opprobrious terms used for that zone. The unconscious power of that realm may be as great as that of infantile sexuality … An unconscious knowledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. And the wretched physical existence strikes a spark in the supreme interest that is scarcely less repressed; it kindles a What is that?' and Where is it going?’ The man who managed to recall what used to strike him in the words dung hill' and pig sty’ might be closer to absolute knowledge than Hegel’s chapter in which readers are promised such knowledge only to have it withheld with a superior mien. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2572

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes Adorno’s post-Auschwitz redefinition of metaphysics as necessarily material, reversing its founding opposition to the bodily.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and the broader Frankfurt School chapter on metaphysical experience. — connects to: Post-Auschwitz metaphysics was forced to confront material bodily existence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2572; Adorno recovered theological motifs materialistically for post-Auschwitz metaphysics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2569; Adorno read Kierkegaard’s aesthetic as a proto-materialist seed of world-change.