Adorno on Politics After Auschwitz 1498515754, 9781498515757

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Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz

Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz Gary A. Mullen

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books Excerpts from Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno Translated by Edmund Jephcott Copyright ©1944 by Social Studies Association, NY. New edition: © S. Fisher Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1969; English trans. © 2002 Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Jr. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup.org. Excerpts from Negative Dialectics © Theodor W. Adorno (author) and E.B. Ashton (translator), 1973, Continuum Publishing US, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mullen, Gary A., 1969- author. Title: Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz / by Gary A. Mullen. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041779| ISBN 9781498515740 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781498515757 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. | Political violence--Philosophy. | Genocide-Philosophy. Classification: LCC B3199.A34 M837 2016 | DDC 320.092--dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2015041779 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1

Rationality and Remembrance

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Morality and Materiality Mimesis and Political Violence Identity and Genocide Negative Dialectic and Democracy Violence and Utopia Democracy as the Critique of Fascism Genocide, Political Judgment, and the Prison Industrial Complex

Conclusion: Philosophy and Genocide Bibliography Index

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23 43 57 75 93 107 115 127 131 135

Acknowledgments

Bloomsbury Publishers and Stanford University Press have graciously permitted the reprinting of passages from Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment. Significant portions of Chapter 4 first appeared in Philosophy Today 50 (Supplement 2006). I would like to thank the many friends, research assistants and colleagues who helped to see this book to completion. Stephen Setman and Spencer Bradley provided invaluable assistance in proofreading, checking citations and serving as a sounding board for the first draft of the manuscript. Michael Schwartz provided generous research guidance during my visit to the Adorno Archive at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Lisa Portmess’s careful reading and suggestions helped to transform a clunky manuscript into a book. I am one of many Gettysburg College faculty members who owe the success of their scholarship to Lisa’s superlative mentoring. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge an intellectual debt to my friend, Garth Gillan, who first introduced me to Adorno’s works and who continually reminds me that we have yet to fathom Adorno’s contribution to philosophy.

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Introduction

Modern political thought began with fear. The fear of “death and wounds” in a lawless and violent state of nature was, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, the impetus that drives us into political life. Modern political theory proceeded from a subject in search of stability and certainty, wiping the slate clean in Cartesian fashion and constructing a new political order with the resources of unaided reason. The work of the Frankfurt School has offered, in various ways, a sustained criticism of this starting point for political thought. The social, historical and objective situation of the subject was the focus of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s work. It was Adorno especially who drew our attention to the preponderance of the object—the cultural and historical conditions out of which the subject is woven. Fear is not a given, it comes from somewhere, from historically and socially specific conditions, objects, relationships. Thinking through this historical specificity is the condition for the emancipation from fear. We are not driven to radical doubt by an abstract quest for certainty. The vivid images of Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Nyarubuye and the killing fields of Cambodia place in question the objective, cultural and political order that made them possible. They are particular events, but they maintain a haunting continuity with the objective patterns of history and culture, poised to provide resources and motives for perpetrators and justifications for bystanders. Adorno’s endeavor to view history from the standpoint of the particular, from the lives cut short by the march of history, is rarely recognized as a contribution to political thought. This book endeavors to elucidate Adorno’s contribution, not only to our understanding why and how genocide occurs, but also to our understanding of the complicity of modern ideas and institutions in the repetition of genocide. In the eyes of his most famous student and critic, Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s version of critical theory miscarried by broadening critical theory into a philosophy of history that encompasses the entire natural history of domination, including the domination of nature by human activity as well as the social and political domination of humans by one another. 1 Consequently, Adorno leaves us with an unachievable, abstract utopian ideal for reconciling the tensions both in society and between humanity and nature. Any historical action is implicated in the history of domination and violence, from which it cannot extract itself by revolutionary or emancipatory praxis. Hence, we may conclude that Adorno’s 1

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critical theory is little more than the quasi-religious lament of a disappointed Marxist, an apology for the theoretically charged resignation of left-wing intellectuals in the wake of the failures of Marxist practice. Adorno’s turn toward a philosophy of history is often criticized as proof positive that he has given up on the critical potential of reason and has sought shelter in an apolitical form of quasi-religious contemplation. 2 To defend Adorno against this criticism, which has long been the consensus among Habermasians, I focus on Adorno’s philosophy of history as a resource for reshaping the sensibility that undergirds political judgment in the classical sense—that is, judgment about the needs and vulnerabilities inherent in the materiality of human life, and the question of how to live together in light of these needs and vulnerabilities. Without a serious treatment of the relationship between Adorno’s primal history of the subject and political judgment, we will miss the relationship between his critical theory and political practice. It is unsurprising that Adorno’s use of eschatological themes in his philosophy of history has struck his critics as incongruous with the aims of critical theory. We often take Adorno one work, one aphorism or one page at a time. And the density of his writing invites, even demands, our narrowly focused attention. It is easy to miss what lies silent between the aphorisms and between Adorno’s frequent leaps from one philosophical mountaintop to the next. Adorno has given us a reason for the silences that make his work necessarily fragmentary in style—and his work as a whole could be interpreted as an attempt to respond to that which philosophy has left us so ill-prepared to address—the irreducible horror of Auschwitz. What follows is an effort to offer such an interpretation. The eschatological tone of Adorno’s critical theory is unintelligible unless it is understood in light of his intellectual confrontation with the Holocaust. The reality of irreducible evil in history calls for the criticism of history from a perspective that is not the product of history’s immanent unfolding. After the Holocaust, it is no longer responsible to give meaning to history by appealing to some providential pattern, and, hence to view the Holocaust as one of the harsh learning experiences of the species. The only hope to which critical reason can lay claim is one that looks at history from the perspective of what history has cast out. Only a rationality that responds to the suffering of particulars, one that responds to the screams of children cremated alive at Auschwitz can claim to be a critical rationality and not merely the rationalization of the victors. 3 The eschatological tone of Adorno’s philosophy of history is often mistaken for a retreat from history and practice. Nothing could be further from Adorno’s intent. Adorno uses eschatological motifs to fashion critical perspectives that contradict the dominant pattern of world history. Only perspectives fashioned from the remains of what history has discarded can resist the constellation of historical, cultural, and social forces that have made the last two centuries ripe for the horror of genocide.

Introduction

3

Adorno’s hope is that reason can be responsive to human suffering without coming apart at the seams. But the language that can speak to the particularity of the suffering imbedded in history belongs in the traditionally “irrational” realms of religion, art, music, poetry and literature. Adorno’s philosophy is an attempt to reweave the fabric of reason around a response to the particular in order to lend a voice to human suffering. In Adorno’s philosophy, reason rescinds its invulnerability and necessity as it cultivates a subtle awareness of the complexity of human relations. Adorno’s focus on Auschwitz is an attempt to reestablish the critical function of reason that promises to respond to the suffering embedded in the details of social life. The eschatological dimension of his thought is interwoven with the reshaping of moral sensibility. In Adorno’s case, it is a sensibility responsive to the age of genocide. As he tells us in the closing chapter of Negative Dialectics, “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” 4 Adorno’s critical theory announces the need for a refashioning of sensibility in the aftermath of the manifest failure of modern ethical and political thought to move civilization away from the barbarity of genocide. The new categorical imperative would be meaningless if there were no possible practices that might prevent the repetition of Auschwitz. The language in which suffering can be understood is one that undermines the veil of necessity behind which our institutions and practices hide their own questionability and contingency. The value of Adorno’s thought in this negation of the present has been understood and studied principally as cultural critique—the meticulous critique of the conditions of intelligibility, enjoyment, and selfhood offered by the culture industry. What is less well acknowledged is the way in which the critique of the present conditions of intelligibility offers intimations of possibility—of other possibilities for practice. His work on the primal history of the subject, studies in anti-Semitism, the structure of fascist propaganda the critique of identity thinking all offer indications of a possible world in which these attitudes and modes of thought are no longer dominant. These possibilities are not infinitely distant but lie within the reach of current practice. Propaganda can be decoded, educational institutions reformed, anti-democratic laws and needless wars protested and drained of popular support. In short, Adorno’s thought is both cultural critique and political critique—it allows us not only to think critically about what we are doing, it also offers us indications for how things can be done differently. The following chapters attempt to build a case for Adorno’s uniquely post-genocidal approach to political thought and practice

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Introduction

Chapter 1: Rationality and Remembrance This chapter offers a close reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to uncover the normative core of Adorno’s philosophy of history, which is inseparable from the theme of remembrance. A critical, materialist philosophy of history is shaped by the remembrance of the seemingly insignificant details that lie on the margins of the dominant historical pattern. This chapter elucidates how this theme of remembrance functions as the last remnant of emancipatory reason in modernity. This interpretation contests the Habermasian reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a “total critique” of Enlightenment that reduces all rationality to domination. A closer reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment demonstrates that Adorno’s project uncovers the normative dimension of the rational subject, whose capacity for critique lies in its endeavor to lend a voice to human suffering. Adorno’s negative dialectic abides with the individual lives destroyed by the general pattern of history and social organization, and thereby provides a critical perspective from which rational longing can be articulated. Chapter 2: Morality and Materiality This chapter will treat Adorno’s critique of modern moral philosophy in its Kantian and utilitarian forms, which sever the relationship between morality and compassion. The normative dimension of Adorno’s critical theory, elucidated in chapter 1, is brought to bear upon his criticisms of modern and postmodern normative theory in an attempt to demonstrate the pitfalls of modern and postmodern approaches to value theory. To that end, this chapter discusses in detail Adorno’s criticisms of Kant and Nietzsche, criticisms which help to situate Adorno’s critical theory as both a critique of modernity and the extreme formulation of modernity found in Nietzsche. Adorno offers us a materialist normative discourse that is shaped by the response to human suffering. In this vein, his criticisms of Kant and Nietzsche center on their contributions to “bourgeois coldness,” whether through the suppression of impulse (Kant) or through the self-creative cultivation of impulse that negates the ethic of compassion (Nietzsche). Chapter 3: Mimesis and Political Violence In Adorno’s work, morality, sociology, politics and epistemology are all intertwined. This is largely due to his view of epistemology as a mimetic response to the social and historical conditions in which we are caught up. Adorno’s analysis of the mimetic nature of subjectivity reveals the fragility of modern institutions and the vulnerability of public life to propaganda and ideological distortion. Modernity has given us a sense of

Introduction

5

ourselves as agents (a subjectivity) forged by the tension between the pellucid Cartesian ego cogito and the impulses expelled from the terrain of the ego cogito. In the political realm, the hostile tension between the subject and its own impulses is externalized, projected onto those persons and groups that become ciphers for the repressed impulses that have been cut away from the subject. The explosion of this potential onto the stage of history in Nazi Germany was, for Adorno, the culminating failure of modern subjectivity that announced the need to formulate a different epistemological standpoint. The philosophical orientation of Adorno’s dialectic, which draws from the concrete details of history to place philosophical ideas in question, is more profoundly political in its inspiration and significance than is recognized within Adorno scholarship. It also gives us reason to question any attempt to resurrect revolutionary violence as a strategy for emancipation. Chapter 4: Identity and Genocide This chapter explores how Adorno’s critique of epistemology crystallizes in his direct confrontation with the Holocaust. The perils of “identity thinking” and “instrumental rationality” can be seen in the genocidal potential of national identity formation as this process has unfolded in connection with the genocide in Rwanda. To that effect, this chapter offers a detailed discussion of the structure of “Hutu Power” propaganda using Adorno’s work on The Psychological Structure of Fascist Propaganda as a lens. (Part of this chapter has already been published in Philosophy Today, see below.) Chapter 5: Negative Dialectic and Democracy This chapter addresses the criticism leveled at Adorno from Post-Habermasian critical theory. While Habermas’s reading of Adorno is narrow in several respects, it correctly identifies the messianic current within critical theory, stretching from Marx through Benjamin, that informs Adorno’s thought. This chapter assesses Habermas’s premature dismissal of the practical and rational temper of the utopian and messianic dimensions of early critical theory. Habermas fails to offer a fair assessment of the practical implications of the critical philosophy of history that Adorno has adapted from Benjamin. This hasty dismissal indicates a flaw within post-Habermasian critical theory as well as the deliberative democratic theory informed by Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Absent a critical philosophy of history, deliberative democratic theory is unable adequately to address the historical situation and limitation of its own norms of reciprocity, accountability and publicity. There is an implicit critical philosophy of history that sustains the norms of deliberative democratic theory insofar as those norms are critical and not ideological.

6

Introduction

A critical philosophy of history allows democratic norms to extend beyond the concerns of self-preservation and national interest that leave democracies impotent in the face of genocide. Chapter 6: Violence and Utopia This chapter explores the relationship between Adorno’s utopianism and the messianic philosophy of history he adapts from Walter Benjamin. Previous chapters have intimated Adorno’s (and Benjamin’s) recognition of the need for philosophy to reconsider its relationship to theology, more precisely, its relationship to the ideals and hopes to which theology gives voice. The influence of this messianic current within critical theory is continued in Slavoj Žižek, albeit in a direction opposed to that of Adorno. In this chapter I explore Adorno’s use of theological themes, and the role that messianic hope plays in the rejuvenation of the critical potential of reason. My reading pays particularly close attention to the political nature of Adorno’s redemption of philosophy and the role that his appropriation of theology plays in social criticism. The utopian dimension of Adorno’s thought provides a norm for the critique of history while indicating the dangers of a philosophy of history that would allow the subject to be the agent of redemption in history. A political subjectivity that can avail itself of “divine,” world-shaping violence is dangerously close to the political subject of genocide. Adorno’s philosophy of history and the theory of political subjectivity that emerges from it is antithetical to a political subjectivity capable of emancipative acts of world-shaping violence that Žižek’s critical theory has resurrected. The “weak messianic power” to create perspectives that “displace and estrange the world” allows the smallest detail of everyday life to reveal the limits of the world in all of its complexity and contingency. Adorno’s political subject is not structured around the exigency of political revolution or revolutionary violence. Against Adorno’s utopianism of the smallest detail, Žižek attempts to resurrect a revolutionary subject that can act as the agent of a universal idea that irrupts into history through political violence and authoritarianism. Chapter 7: Democracy as the Critique of Fascism Adorno has often, and not without good reason, been accused of having a “political deficit” in his critical theory. This chapter tests the limits of that claim by drawing our attention to Adorno’s attempts at political intervention through his work on decoding propaganda and educational reform. His often tumultuous relationship with the student movement in Germany is assessed in light of the ways in which his theory informed his own political practice throughout his career.

Introduction

7

Chapter 8: Genocide, Political Judgment, and the Prison Industrial Complex It can be argued that any unrelenting criticism of the concepts we use to justify institutions, social norms, ways of life and modes of power is bound to have political implications. Whether or not practices enjoy an undisturbed discourse of legitimacy or face radical critique has effects on what we do and how we do it. Adorno’s work provides us with more than a blanket negation of present practice. A new mode of judgment weighted toward the particular allows us to use practical, legal concepts in a different way, one in which present practices can be placed in question on their own terms. In this chapter I draw on J.M. Bernstein’s reading of Adorno’s critique of identity thinking to assess the tendentially genocidal prison industrial complex in the United States. I address the ways in which the legal definition of genocide has been used to evade political responsibility in the face of genocide and how Adorno’s critique of conceptualization offers a more politically viable way of thinking about and judging instances of genocide. NOTES 1. For a discussion of this criticism, see, Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 16–20. The various criticisms of Adorno will be addressed throughout and are given detailed attention in chapter 5. 2. This criticism comes mostly from Habermas’s discussions of Adorno in Philosophical-Political Profiles, The Theory of Communicative Action, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. See chapter 5 for a detailed treatment of Habermas’s criticism of Adorno. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 361ff; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 354. 4. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 358.

ONE Rationality and Remembrance

INSTRUMENTAL REASON AND THE LOSSES OF HISTORY What centrally concerned Adorno and the rest of the critical theorists was the ease with which modern ideas and institutions could become instruments of domination. Advances in science and technology engendered by the Enlightenment took place in the midst of social and political conditions that were increasingly oppressive. The promise of the Enlightenment, and the justification for severing ties with the Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition of reason, was that the new science would provide increasing control over the forces of nature and reduce the precariousness of human life. The Enlightenment promise held that there was a parallel between the advancement of science and the progress of human freedom. The facility with which science was turned against the cause of human freedom and to the detriment of the human condition is what concerned Adorno, Horkheimer and critical theorists generally. 1 Adorno dedicated his life to restoring the relationship between reason and human freedom. His work is both a testament to the fragility of the bond between reason and freedom, and an endeavor to repair reason so that it can again speak on behalf of human emancipation. Adorno’s project is nothing less than the effort to recover the critical potential of reason—a potential which was lost through the formalization and abstraction of reason from the details and complex interactions of social life. Formal reason, or what Adorno terms “instrumental reason” or the “identity principle,” severed rationality from the lives of embodied subjects who are prone to suffering, and whose very suffering announces the need for critique. Recovering the critical potential of reason requires relocating reason in its social context, in the context of human needs, longings, and hopes. Only by relocating reason in its material and social con9

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text and reconnecting it with the human condition that it promised to improve, can it renew its potential as a voice of criticism. This critical potential arises from the knowledge that reason is not pure, that it has a history in which opposing forms of understanding and shaping the world have been occluded or lost. This occlusion and loss is not simply that of concepts or ideas: it is the destruction of peoples, ways of life and possibilities for human expression and happiness. Critical reason is, then, motivated by the remembrance of suffering and lost possibilities. The ideas, values and ways of life that have been victorious in the march of history cannot be permitted to have the last word. Critical reason lives through a hope that transcends the march of history. “Without hope,” Adorno avers, “the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable.” 2 In the famous finale to Minima Moralia, Adorno expresses this hope in theological language: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is construction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. 3

Critical reason is motivated by eschatological hope, a hope for the mending of the wounds of history. Regaining the critical potential of reason requires that reason question its own history to see what has been banished and cut away from its concepts and categories. Adorno’s critical theory endeavored to hold fast to “the last hope for thought” in “a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern.” 4 The Dialectic of Enlightenment is just such an attempt to interrogate the history of reason in the name of the hope for a better world that reason has left unsatisfied. The link between critical reason and eschatological hope is evident in Adorno’s treatment of the “primal history of the modern subject” in Dialektik der Aufklärung or Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in collaboration with his lifelong friend and colleague Max Horkheimer during his years of exile in the United States. While it has become one of the most seminal and scandalous works of critical theory, it was disseminated mostly through pirated versions until its republication in 1970. 5 The Dialectic of Enlightenment expresses the fundamental philosophical outlook from which Adorno never departed in his later works. The text has led a paradoxical existence and has been labeled as falling within every category along the political spectrum from neo-conservative to radically nihilistic; it has been rejected by orthodox Marxists, pragmatists and critical social theorists for its debilitating pessimism and its inability to formulate a theoretical foundation for political practice and social change. According

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to Jürgen Habermas and other contemporary critical theorists, the Dialectic of Enlightenment marked the departure of Adorno and Horkheimer from sound social theory to the rarefied heights of the philosophy of history. 6 THE PRIMAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT AS A POLITICAL QUESTION Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous inquiry into the “primal origins of the modern subject” had an explicitly political motivation: unearthing the roots of the bourgeois coldness and bureaucratic rationality characteristic of the extermination industry of Nazi Germany. The meticulously ordered system of terror generated by the Nazis was more aided than thwarted by modern science and its epistemological foundations. The marriage of science and Nazi terror announced the urgent need to find what had been missed in the generation of modern thought and modern subjectivity. According to Adorno, the increased potential for political terror lay in the effort of the subject to overcome the vulnerability and ephemerality of both the untamed impulses of the subject and the phenomena of an alien and unsubdued nature. The struggle to gain a secure place within the manifold of elemental forces is not by itself the origin of the evils of the modern world. The problem arises when the subject’s project of self-preservation fails to cultivate an awareness of its own limits, of its origins in a struggle both within itself and against its natural surroundings and fellow human beings, that leave it always impure, open to self-questioning, always in tension with itself. It is precisely the eclipse of this awareness that has exploded the self-deceptive and destructive potentials of the modern subject. The stated aim of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was “nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” 7 Unlike their earlier studies which focused principally on the obstacles to emancipation posed by capitalist society, Adorno and Horkheimer now turned their attention to the obstacles that reason itself posed to the possibilities for human emancipation. 8 There was a fundamental flaw in the modes of thinking that the Enlightenment had bequeathed to Europe, a flaw that opened up the horrific possibilities that had come to the fore in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Why had modern science, with its promise of freedom from ignorance, tradition, and myth, proved unable to deter the political debacle of the first half of the twentieth century? Objective conditions during the World War II seemed to betray every promise of modernity— human freedom, autonomy, the amelioration of suffering, liberation from life under irrational authority.

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An inquiry into the origins of the subject, would, Adorno believed, reveal the insidious flaw that had led modernity to such catastrophic destruction. The concept of enlightened thought itself contained “the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.” 9 What concerned Adorno was that the cultural space for critical thought, or what he referred to as the “theoretical understanding” (theoretische Verständnisses), had evaporated. 10 The methodology of the specialized sciences requires adherence to the “given facts” without raising questions about the given facts; differently stated, scientific rationality in its positivist form, refuses to break from or to negate the “given facts” and familiar categories of thought. In this way, modern science—in the distorted ideological form that it has taken on in bourgeois society—has eliminated critical thought, which requires the questioning of the facts of social life from the perspective of the values central to human co-existence: justice, goodness, freedom. 11 The subordination of humanity to the scientific laws governing “the facts,” leaves humanity in the position of being carried about on the shoulders of fate—a fate meted out by scientific causality in lieu of mythical gods. Our attempts to become the masters and possessors of nature have been revisited upon us through our own creation of an even more oppressive “second nature,” which manifests itself in a repressive social order and receives the sanction, not of the gods, but of the pellucid quantified givens of mathematical cognition. 12 Enlightened thought, Adorno avers, has left behind its critical element and become “a mere means in the service of an existing order.” 13 Modern society finds itself under the heel of anonymous “rational” forces whose limitations are even more inimical to freedom than the mythological forces they were meant to dispel. Hence, Adorno writes, [T]he cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. 14

Enlightenment itself bears with it the mythological form from which it believed to have freed itself. What is behind this lapse of enlightenment into mythology? How could the enlightened world have permitted the resurgence of barbarity? Even more pressing is the question of how the most advanced products of modern science, and even the most extraordinary advances in human science, could become the instruments of barbarity.

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MYTH AND THE DOMINATION OF NATURE The answer to the pressing question of why modernity and enlightenment have lapsed into barbarity is to be found in the dialectical relationship between myth and enlightenment. Enlightenment has its origins in myth, and myth itself is a form of enlightenment. 15 Along this journey of the primal subject from its early beginnings in myth to the resurgence of myth in enlightenment, we find reason losing contact with those needs, concrete yearnings, and deepest longings that bind reason to communal life and to the normative motivation of reason. The result of reason’s separation from the needs of life is the continual confinement of reason to the imperatives of control, efficiency, and power in controlling phenomena, both with regard to physical phenomena in nature and human phenomena in society. Myth initiates the separation of logos and manifold that is further refined in enlightenment. 16 The gods serve as a primitive conceptual framework for elemental powers. The elemental powers are thus placed into a category, under the dominion of an imagined divinity that can be swayed by human sacrifice and supplication. 17 The logic of sacrifice and that of modern reason bear the fundamental similarity that both are manifestations of the attempt of thought to exercise control over natural forces, and to impose a unity upon the manifold of experience. With this primal separation of logos and manifold, existence and appearance, we find, according to Adorno, the primal origins of the journey of the modern subject: a journey motivated by the attempt to gain domination over the elements and to free humanity from the sources of fear and anguish that threaten the enjoyment of life. We also find the primal origin of one of the central oppositions within the subject, an opposition that has become so deeply entrenched in western thought that it is taken to be the very hallmark of reason: the separation of form and content. 18 The dynamic behind this separation and what makes it so insidious for the course of civilization can be seen through a careful treatment of how myth serves as a moment of enlightenment, and of how enlightenment repeats the fundamental obstacles to human emancipation imposed by myth. From the perspective of enlightenment, the basis of myth is the “projection of subjective properties onto nature.” 19 We do not gain from reading Adorno some vision of what the primal unity of subject and object must have been like, nor do we find in his works any nostalgia for a lost primitive world in which subject and object were one. Indeed, Adorno offers us an account of the emergence of subjectivity or rational thought that is fundamentally contrary to the rationalist and idealist understanding of subjectivity. There are no structures of subjectivity prior to its interaction with objects or with a world. 20 This does not, as we shall see, leave Adorno in the position of offering a purely passive account of the subject. In its confrontation with objects and forces in the

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world, the subject has no pre-given modes of reaction. There does seem to be an index, intimation, or, one might say, a weak telos embedded in all living things, and in nature itself: to overcome suffering. 21 This yearning is not merely subjective, that is, it is not a structure projected onto a mute nature by the syntheses of the subject. This yearning is a vital force present both within subject and object, and serves as the basis for the fundamental link between subject and object, thought and the world. Adorno’s history of the subject indicates that the course of the subject’s development is far from necessary. It is not a history of the unfolding of the expectations of the subject; instead, it is a history of the objective constitution of the subject. The history of the subject has been a history of contingencies. At every step, it was possible for humanity to have understood its experience differently, to have encountered nature, both externally and within, differently. It was, and is, always possible to have a less rigid and narrow understanding of nature and its possibilities. Adorno’s account of the history of the subject indicates that freedom is not to be found in the progressive imposition of subjective necessity onto nature, but, rather, in the recovery of contingency, of the objective possibilities cut away from the subject and from nature. The narrowing of thought has its origins in the structure of myth and the practice of sacrifice. Like enlightenment, myth endeavors to provide some understanding of, and some controllable link with, the forces of nature. “All sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the god for whom they are performed: by imposing on him the primacy of human purposes they dissolve away his power.” 22 Sacrifices and mythical frameworks attempt to establish and to affirm the regularity and repetition of the forces of nature. They are the primitive attempt to structure the world in accord with subjective expectation. A world that is patterned and repetitious provides security, and, to that extent, a feeling of command over the powers of nature: the predictable pattern of the seasons comes as a product of the sacrifices and supplications that have pleased the gods. This security is purchased at the price of the spontaneity of the subject’s interpretation of the object: “Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster with the gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships.” 23 Enlightenment prides itself, and even defines itself, as freedom from the limitations of myth and the irrational forms of obedience that myth demanded. The figures of myth are unmasked as mere images of a frightened humanity. The unknown and unpredictable in nature inspires the fear that fuels the imagination behind myth. The enlightenment view of myth is that it is a projection of the subject: its source, and ultimately the source that unifies all things is generated by human labor (imagination). Thus, “the multiplicity of mythical figures can be reduced to a single common denominator, the subject.” 24

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But this, according to Adorno, is precisely the aim of enlightenment, to base knowledge upon the pellucid self-certainty of subjective representations: “For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows.” 25 Natural phenomena are, under the gaze of the subject, understood as repetitions of quantified physical law. However, now it is not the sanction of God or the supplications to Zeus or Poseidon that ground the predictability of the cycles of modern physics, it is the subject itself that assures dominion over nature. MYTH AND DOMINATION This increase in power over nature has its cost. There is a further similarity between myth and enlightenment regarding internal nature, or the nature within the subject. “Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power.” 26 In a different formulation, the mathematical tools that enabled humanity to control nature lose none of their capacity for domination when they are turned toward the self and others. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. 27

Thus, the subject becomes caught in the unifying domination that binds subject and object. 28 On the one hand, mastery is gained over external nature, as the subject becomes the ground of the bestowal of meaning, and the object (external nature) becomes the “accidental bearer” of significance marked by the activity of the subject. 29 It is crucial in the subject’s transformation into what is at once the locus of domination and of being dominated. In its relation to nature the subject is limited and shaped by its relationship to the object. If this relationship is governed principally by domination, then the lens through which the subject views itself is also tainted by the logic of domination—we know only what we can make, only what we can predict and control. In short, the problem arises from the subject’s attempt to finalize and to stabilize its relation to nature, both within and without itself; the motive for this arises from the initially salutary impetus for self-preservation. But the exaggeration of self-preservation leads to the paranoid desire for total control over nature. The result is the ossification of spontaneity both within nature and within the subject. The mark of the eclipse of spontaneity is repetition. In myth, repetition took the form of the retribution of the gods or fate; enlighten-

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ment evokes fate in another form, that of the repetition of physical laws. Adorno writes, Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief, until even the concept of mind, truth, and, indeed, enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic. 30

What Adorno brings to our attention here is the principal crisis of enlightenment thought. Enlightenment has brought its ruthless criticism of myth, of anything, or of any claim that derives from contact with a power not derived from the signifying power of the subject, to the point where the source of meaning is uncovered as power, or mere domination. The only thing left in the wake of the Enlightenment criticism of myth is the dominating power of human will. But, as Adorno demonstrates, this itself bears all the hallmarks of myth: fate, necessity, repetition. Myth and enlightenment remain close relatives across millennia. What they share is their invocation of fatal necessity: The principle of the fated necessity which caused the downfall of the mythical hero, and finally evolved as the logical conclusion from the oracular utterance, not only predominates, refined to the cogency of formal logic, in every rationalistic system of Western philosophy but also presides over the succession of systems which begins with the hierarchy of the gods and, in a permanent twilight of the idols, hands down a single identical content: wrath against those of insufficient righteousness. Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology. 31

This dialectic of myth and enlightenment seriously compromises the enlightenment promise to emancipate humanity from myth and arbitrary authority. The repetition imposed by enlightenment proves to be even more stifling to human hopes for emancipation, despite its rhetoric to the contrary: [T]he more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects. The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself . . . the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was. Whatever might be different is made the same. That is the verdict which critically sets the boundaries to possible experience. 32

The “principle of immanence” rules both the distortion of myth and enlightenment. The mythical subjection of elemental powers to rituals and sacrifices collapses the transcendent foreignness of nature to human will parallels the enlightenment reduction of all meaning to the activity of the

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subject, the source of all the categories and rules of what is knowable. In this way, both myth and enlightenment reduce “what is” to immanence: to the repetition of what has already occurred, or to what is in principle derivable from what has already occurred. It is the accomplishment of both myth and enlightenment that it “amputates the incommensurable.” 33 What both myth and enlightenment promote is the repetition of the present, and hence the suppression of what is unknown, unexpected, and spontaneous in nature, both within the subject and without. For repetition is an abstraction; what is repeated is never concretely the same. The emphasis upon abstraction, principally the abstraction of mathematical physics, increases the loss of the concrete, the individual, the unrepeatable qualities of the lives of individuals. The individual, then, suffers a similar fate as nature, when knowledge is limited by the paradigm of what is formally, abstractly repeatable: Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (Trupp), which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment. 34

The nature that has been reduced by the subject into a repetition of physical laws is disenchanted, depersonalized; absent the ordering syntheses of the subject, nature is meaningless, it has no inherent structure or desires of its own. The nature within the subject must also undergo demythologization. The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its rigidity, disintegrating itself as animistic. Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings. 35

Along with the death of nature as a bearer of meaning (i.e., along with the despiritualization of nature) nature within the subject—desires, impulses, feelings—becomes deadened. Adorno writes, “[T]he regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped,” for along with the separation of thought and sensation, the nuances of sensation must be repressed in the name of reason. 36 This is especially true in the case of feelings that announce the present state of affairs as intolerable. We lose the sensibility capable of articulating the concrete aspects of life not easily formalized or captured within the limits of abstract thought; this is the case not only at the level of conceptualization but within society as well. The subject, to paraphrase Thoreau, becomes the tool of its own tools, and it also becomes a tool vis-

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à-vis other subjects. The scope of experience that it is capable of thinking is narrowed in proportion to the formalization of its thought. The knowledge that tabooed what really concerned the object also tabooed the knowledge that concerns the deepest needs of the human person; what is most notably lost here is the expression within thought or action of genuine spontaneity and freedom. The manipulation of nature that promised to deliver humanity from its enslavement to nature has produced methods for manipulation and enslavement that far surpass the forces of nature in their effectiveness and terror. Adorno’s primal history of the subject explored the dark side of the enlightenment and introduced an ostensibly pessimistic account of the historical development of Western reason—a pessimism for which he has been so roundly criticized by other critical theorists. What such criticisms miss within Adorno’s account of the development of civilization is the intimation of better possibilities that leave history open to a better future. Adorno saw in Homer’s Odyssey an allegory for the unfolding of the Enlightenment subject. Each of Odysseus’s confrontations with the powers that block his homecoming is overcome through the sacrifice of his crew and through more stringent repression of Odysseus’s own nature. But there was always a promise in Odysseus’s journeys that a real homecoming might be found through all of the sacrifices and renunciations; that the discipline was for something, linked to some fulfillment or good, and not an end it itself. The sense of “wholeness” Odysseus hopes to gain by coming home is a state wrested from the struggle with mythic forces. It does not signify surrender or acquiescence or being at home in the acceptance of myth. Odysseus’s homecoming is the motivation for defiance of myth. Homecoming can serve as such an ideal for Odysseus because the battle with mythical forces is not forgotten. Like Odysseus, the modern subject must escape from its own myth—the myth of subjective primacy. Enlightenment threatens to collapse within its own myth if it loses the element of remembrance, of what has been lost and can never be fully regained, but nonetheless gives the human journey hope—a hope that can be had only by “holding fast the past atrocity through memory.” 37 David Held has offered a concise articulation of the hope of “homecoming” in Odysseus and reconciliation in Adorno: “The Odyssean homecoming might promise reconciliation between people and nature, and between people and one another, but it remains a promise—it awaits actualization.” 38 And in Adorno’s own words, “Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power.” 39

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ODYSSEY AND REMEMBRANCE Odysseus’s homecoming—to the extent it is an enlightened homecoming—is possible only through the remembrance of the scars of history that are woven into the present. Only such remembrance can motivate, critique, and foster the awareness of the contingency of suffering and the hope for a truly human nature. 40 This strategy for mending the wounds of the subject is not able to satisfy the ideals of modern autonomy and self-grounding reason, as Habermas and others have indicated. It is at this point that Adorno’s version of critical theory departed from the original promise of critical theory to formulate a theory of society capable of effecting social change. The vision provided by the Dialectic of Enlightenment seemed too bleak to offer theoretical support for revolutionary political action, either of the orthodox Marxist variety or that of the student movements during the 1960s. 41 But Adorno has made a compelling case for why a philosophy of history that places the modern subject and its redemptive promises in question is necessary for recovering the normative ground of social theory. The historical unfolding of rationality is not able, in its dominant instrumental form, to make amends with what it has excluded and crushed on the slaughter bench of history. There is more in this point than a lament over a lost past. In fact it is an error to understand Adorno as espousing a hope for the restoration of a lost purity or primal wholeness. Adorno’s refutation of the progressive view of history is not inspired by mere textual contradictions in the writings of the champions of progress. The occasion for the dark proclamations of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was the emergence of fascism, totalitarianism, and mass killing in the heart of the very civilization that carried the banner of progress and reason. It was the eruption of terror within civilization, an eruption which was not so much resisted by modern civilization as aided by its very structures, that provoked the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Events themselves called for a reevaluation of the notion that the “wounds of the spirit heal without leaving a scar”—that the itinerary of modern civilization had left barbarity in its past. 42 The analysis of Adorno places in question modernity’s progressive self-conception, and along with this, the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of modern science, epistemology, morality, and politics. Within the formation of the subject lies the potential for domination to become an end in itself, for the subject to forget its limits, to forget its own objectivity and vulnerability. The eclipse of the empirical subject generates the coldness and abstractness of thought that pervades modern civilization and that opened channels for the ethical and political horror of genocide. The event of genocide cannot be thought outside of its historical specificity. The struggle to formulate a definition of genocide—as if its formal conditions could be abstracted and captured within a legal category—is a

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futile extension of the way of thinking Adorno and Horkheimer thoroughly critiqued in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Sound political reasoning proceeds from a response to the remnants of lives caught within the constellation of nationalism, racism, imperialism, technology that have morphed into the most destructive political acts to emerge in human history. Genocide is not a definition. It is a field of historical, political possibilities that we think, not through the invulnerable clarity of legal definitions, but through the names (Auschwitz, Nyarubuye, Srebrenica) of the places where these possibilities materialized. Only through those names and the countless human stories they cut short can our theorizing about genocide begin to formulate a response to the horror. Reason mediated by these narratives, by the visceral response to the lives cut short and the stories that will never unfold, gestures toward overcoming the collapse of reason into mythology that Adorno inveighed against. In this encounter with its historical conditions, reason cannot resurrect a triumphal narrative of progress, but it might regain its contact with human lives and cultivate the humility appropriate for its own critique. NOTES 1. This is clearly evident in the introductory remarks of Dialectic of Enlightenment: “We have no doubt—and herein lies our petition principii—that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], p. xvi; Gesammelte Shriften III, p. 13). Here, of course, Horkheimer and Adorno refer to the critical potential of enlightened thought, and not the form of enlightenment thought that reverts to myth. 2. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 98; Gesammelte Schriften IV, p. 108. 3. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247; Gesammelte Schriften IV, p. 281. 4. Ibid., pp. 67–68; Gesammelte Schriften IV, p. 74. 5. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 255. 6. This criticism has its origin in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 366–399. 7. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 11. 8. It has been widely debated which sections of Dialectic of Enlightenment should be attributed to Adorno and which to Horkheimer. A convincing case is made by Robert Hullot-Kentnor that the entire work is through and through a hybrid product of both authors (see Hullot-Kentnor, “Back to Adorno,” Telos 81 [Fall 1989], pp. 5–29). It has also been well noted that the basic theme of Dialectic of Enlightenment remains closer to the central theme of Adorno’s work than to that of Horkheimer, who was not sanguine about its later republication. With the understanding that the work is a hybrid for which both authors are due credit, for the purpose of brevity I hereafter cite the work to Adorno. 9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xvi; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 13. 10. Ibid., p. xvi; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 14.

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11. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 14–15. 12. Ibid., pp. xv–xvi. Adorno has the following to say about the eclipse of critical thought within educational institutions: “To render their function entirely superfluous appears, despite all the benevolent reforms, to be the ambition of the educational system. In the belief that without strict limitation to the observation of facts and the calculation of probabilities the cognitive mind would be overreceptive to charlatanism and superstition, that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy acceptance of charlatanism and superstition” (ibid.). The relationship between modern epistemology and social domination is thoroughly treated in Against Epistemology: “The power of logical absolutism over the psychological grounding of logic is borrowed from the objectivity of the social process which subjects individuals to compulsion while remaining opaque to them” (Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. Willis Domingo [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982], p. 76). See also, Against Epistemology, pp. 4, 9. 13. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xv; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 12. 14. Ibid., p. xvi; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 14. 15. Ibid., p. xviii; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 5; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 24. 17. Ibid. 18. Adorno, Against Epistemology, pp. 11–12, 15. 19. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 4; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 22. 20. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 183; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p.183. This is merely one example of the preponderance of the object, a theme that runs throughout Adorno’s work. 21. “The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 203; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 203. And suffering is the common condition of dominated nature; it is the expression of the natural history of both subject and object: “The expression of history in things is nothing other than that of past torment” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 49; Gesammelte Schriften IV, p. 55). 22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 68. 23. Ibid., p. 5; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 25. 24. Ibid., p. 4; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 22–23. 25. Ibid., p. 4; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 23. 26. Ibid., p. 6; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 25. 27. Ibid., p. 6; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 25. 28. Adorno, Against Epistemology, pp. 15, 22. 29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 7; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 27. 30. Ibid., p. 11; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 27. 31. Ibid., p. 8; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 27–28. 32. Ibid., p. 8; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 28. 33. Ibid., p. 9; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 29. 34. Ibid., p. 9; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 28. 35. Ibid., pp. 44–45; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 76. 36. Ibid., p. 28; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 54. 37. Ibid., p. 61; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 98. 38. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 403. 39. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 32; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 58. 40. Adorno, Against Epistemology, p. 39. Critical reason is grounded in the “mindfulness of the suffering that sedimented itself in concepts” (ibid.).

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41. See the discussion of Adorno’s interaction with the student movements in chapter 7. 42. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 407.

TWO Morality and Materiality

THE MORAL ADDENDUM: SUFFERING AND CRITIQUE The historical consciousness that undergirds instrumental rationality has far reaching consequences for ethics and politics. Much of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was dedicated to drawing the connection between enlightenment and morality and Adorno’s later works explored the interweaving of historical consciousness with politics and ethics. His critique of enlightenment is a critique of the collective self-conception of western modernity and the way in which it has undermined its own ideals. Instrumental reason is one leading thread woven into an entire way of life that has turned against itself. There is a harmony in the administered world, a coherence that binds the life and consciousness of the individual with the surrounding world, but it is a coherence that effaces the life of the individual. The administered world is the Sittlichkeit of the wrong state of things, a harmony of part and whole in which particularity is effaced. The chapters dealing with ethics in the Dialectic of Enlightenment give us a clue regarding the political and ethical guidance that stems from the critique of modernity. It affirms the inseparability of ethics and politics while developing an ethical disposition contrary to “the wrong state of things.” A close reading of these chapters gives us an indication of the relationship between instrumental rationality and genocidal politics and carries warnings regarding unreflective political engagements that promise emancipation while repeating the old patterns of domination. The dialectical or reflexive relationship between the domination of nature and the domination imposed by humans on each other is not unique to Adorno’s critique of enlightenment. It is a fundamentally Hegelian theme placed in the context of late modernity, in which the master23

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slave dialectic has not worked itself out through a propitious overcoming (Aufhebung). The imperative to become masters and possessors of nature has lost its substantive goal and become an imperative for mastery for its own sake that renders all other goals irrational. In this way the subject has lost the language for any aim not justified in terms of stability and efficiency. Moral language that once aspired to articulate the intricacies of virtue becomes a formalized, easily duplicated set of procedures and calculations in its Kantian and utilitarian forms. Moral language has lost its connection with the aesthetic dimension of experience, with the objective and empirical aspects of subjectivity: its feeling, suffering, impulses, and sense of mortality. Instead of integrating these elements into its selfconception, the subject conceives of them as external and alien. To be human, to be a rational subject is to be defined in opposition to these elements. The dominant currents within modern moral philosophy leave us with a subject that cannot respond to suffering, or that has no way of articulating such a response and integrating its own vulnerability into its moral disposition. This tendency is not simply a set of philosophical theses but is the conceptual surface of a whole network of human activity in which we labor upon nature and upon each other. Altering the moral and philosophical disposition toward identity thinking and instrumental reason requires a shift in our interpretation of history, a shift away from the immanent pattern of its development. We need to offer an account of history from the perspective of what history has cast out, not only through events that destroy human lives but through interpretations, narratives and systems of thought that steel themselves against the disruption of meaning brought on by the response to suffering. Adorno’s conception of critical theory is motivated by the need to integrate that response into a theory of society and a redeemed notion of reason as critical rather than merely instrumental. 1 Adorno’s philosophy of history constitutes a fundamental rejection of the Hegelian notion that “the real is the rational” and that the “slaughter bench” of history is the chronicle of freedom and reason unfolding. Hegel’s view of history is paradoxically “construed and negated” by Adorno. History has a pattern but that pattern is contrary to freedom. A truly human history would require the negation of that pattern. But negated how? Adorno recognized that we have the scientific and technological capability to end poverty and hunger, and that a fundamentally different world is possible. But the pattern of history isn’t merely an interpretation that can be dismissed by dint of will. History has a certain cultural and material density, and every move forward carries with it the risk of repetition. A better world is possible, so long as we remain mindful that our historical situation leaves us more prone to become an Eichmann than a Gandhi. Negating the universal pattern while avoiding an abstract negation of history requires that we occupy the position of the particular, with all of its contingency and vulnerability, against the universal. This posi-

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tion never leaves us justified by the broad pattern of things. We are never in a position to separate the sheep from the goats, to proclaim the verdict of history over others. There is no position within history so pristinely free from the distortion and violence of social and political struggles. Any reason worthy of the name draws its impetus for critique from the lives and longings that the dominant course of history has occluded. It draws from below and casts its hope beyond the present state of things. In this sense, reason is drawn by ta eschata, ends that lie beyond and grate against the trajectory of the present. The opening toward those ends is etched in the details of particular lives in their confrontation with powers indifferent to their continued existence. The careful cultivation of the space within which something new might happen, even in the face of overwhelming forces posed against it, is the eschatological core of Adorno’s conception of reason. CONFRONTATION WITH KANT Adorno’s analysis of modern moral philosophy is dedicated to working through (in the psychoanalytic sense) the accomplishments of enlightenment. Only a careful attention to the successes we have had in overcoming brute nature can show the way beyond instrumental reason, which is both an accomplishment and an “iron cage.” In Adorno’s words, “Where thought transcends the bonds it tied in resistance [to nature]—there is freedom. Freedom follows the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.” 2 In his criticism of Kant, Adorno endeavors to show how Kant’s emphasis on the formal conditions for moral reason has failed to satisfy our need to have a moral language in which our vulnerability can be recognized. It is one of the features of instrumental reason to render the capacity for control and power final, or most definitive of the rational. According to its standard, we know only what we make and can control. Adorno writes, Reason contributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements of fixed conceptual relationships. Any substantial objective which might be put forward as a rational insight is, according to the Enlightenment in its strict sense, delusion, falsehood, “rationalization,” no matter what pains individual philosophers may take to steer us away from this conclusion and toward a reliance on philanthropic feeling. 3

Adorno also cites Kant’s definition of reason— “a faculty . . . of deducing the particular from the universal”—as paradigmatic of modern reason. 4 We find here two central problems in the formulation of reason that lead it to eclipse the vulnerability and contingency of the particular. Along with degrading the status of the particular vis-à-vis rationality, there is

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also the loss of the capacity of reason to conceive of substantive aims, aims that are definitive for reason. As reason became reinterpreted as a human tool rather than a structural feature of nature, the procedural quality of reason becomes emphasized to the exclusion of outcomes and goals. The only measure of its value becomes its efficacy, its power to shape phenomena in the natural world. The capacity of the understanding to shape phenomena in accord with its categories, according to Kant, assures the “homogeneity of the universal and the particular,” a homogeneity that the universal imposes upon the particular. 5 A fine sensitivity for the affects woven into a philosophical position is the virtue of Adorno’s way of thinking. The way in which fear, pleasure, pain and joy shape the terrain of the intellect allows us to see something different at work in the enlightenment endeavor to find a single homogenous criterion for rationality; it is driven by an instinct for self-preservation that interprets difference as a potential threat. The point of the primal history of the subject is to keep us mindful that no matter what abstract, apparently affectless ideas we are contemplating, we are still animals thinking. When we lose sight of this, we lose sight of the preconditions of thought, and with that we lose the basis for genuine critique and self-reflection. The ability to shape the natural environment through science, or even science by itself, is not the obstacle to human emancipation, nor is a return to nature the goal. Understanding science within its social, political and lived context is the need Adorno addresses: A thinking which fails to maintain agreement between system and perception does not merely violate isolated visual impressions; it conflicts with real praxis. Not only does the expected event fail to occur but the unexpected happens: the bridge collapses, the crop fails, the medicine causes illness. The spark which most conclusively indicates a lack of systematic thinking, a violation of logic, is not a fleeting perception but sudden death. 6

The notion that Adorno rejects scientific rationality tout court as an unmitigated evil is, as this passage evinces, quite mistaken. 7 The use of reason as an instrument to control our environment plays a crucial role in our survival and happiness. The conditions for survival are normative. A whole network of social relations (of recognition and cooperation) goes into constituting the subject and the endeavor to shape nature in accord with human needs. A crucial point which will be dealt with in chapter 5 is that Adorno understood this cooperative labor as having the potential to be responsive to nature and not a brutal imposition of a cooperative will to dominate all non-human life. Modernity opened up new horizons for the overcoming of nature and framed the way in which freedom was understood. An emancipated and unified humanity is one that has overcome nature and imposed its own form on the world. This ideal had a dark side that would reveal itself in the expansion of the European pow-

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ers across the globe and in the power imposed upon indigenous populations. In his book on the genocide in Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch tells of his exchange with a pygmy soldier which could serve as an emblem of how this enlightenment idea has come full circle: “Humanity’s struggle to conquer nature,” the pygmy said fondly. “It is the only hope. It is the only way for peace and reconciliation—all humanity as one against nature.” He sat back in his chair, with his arms crossed over his chest, and went silent. After a while, I said, “But humanity is part of nature, too.” “Exactly,” the pygmy said. “That is exactly the problem.” 8

The way in which the domination of nature makes its way into the structure of the subject can be seen in the dualisms of modern philosophy. Descartes’ blueprint for making humans “the masters and possessors of nature” divided the subject into res cogitans and res extensa: an active part that thinks and wills, and a passive part that obeys. Kant repeats this dualism in his distinction between the transcendental and empirical ego. Adorno writes, The difficulties within this concept of reason, arising from the fact that its subjects, the bearers of one and the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the Western Enlightenment behind the apparent clarity of its judgments. In the Critique of Pure Reason, however, those difficulties make themselves apparent in the unclear relationship of the transcendental to the empirical ego and in the other irreconcilable contradictions. 9

These contradictions are not simply contradictions in Kant’s texts, they are social contradictions hidden within the concepts of Kantian philosophy. The nature of Kant’s schematism, the harmonizing of particular and concept is, according to Adorno, to be found in the structure and interests of industrial society: Everything—including the individual human being, not to mention the animal—becomes a repeatable, replaceable process, a mere example of the conceptual models of the system. 10

It is characteristic of capitalist society to conceive of itself in such a way that the concrete, social relations that constitute it are lost to thought. Adorno’s was first exposed to Kant during his teen years through the instruction of Sigfried Kracauer, his tutor at the time. Kracauer’s advice to read Kant’s categories of the understanding as the categories of capitalist society, became the leading thread in his interpretation of Kant and of philosophy in general. 11

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COMMODITY FETISHISM AND MORALITY Adorno’s critique of instrumental rationality borrows heavily from Marx’s analysis of the operation of commodity fetishism in capitalist society. 12 According to Marx, capitalist economy and society is conceived under the rubric of the circulation of commodities. The value of a thing is understood in terms of its exchange value, its value on the market, in relation to other commodities. The exchange value abstracts the thing from the social context of its use-value, that is, its value “from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point of view that those properties are the product of human labour.” 13 With values abstracted from their sensuous, social, empirical context, the capitalist world views itself as a concatenation of relationships between abstract entities, prices, exchange rates, monetary values that are autonomous, severed from the concrete economic productive activity which they are supposed to describe. Under the distortion of commodity fetishism, objectivity is established by the universal principle of exchange, money, and is severed from the lives of the sensuous subjects whose work and lives produced the commodities. This is the social basis for the separation of the empirical and transcendental ego. The abstract a priori structure of the transcendental ego serves as the arbiter of knowledge, by its ordering of the empirical world and the empirical ego. What is lost in this separation of empirical and transcendental ego is the determination of knowledge by any of the features of the empirical ego, interest, passion, desire, suffering. 14 In this state of severance, the abstract reasoning of the transcendental ego loses its mooring in concrete life, and therewith loses its capacity to offer ethical guidance. Only the abstract, formal, procedural ordering of the transcendental ego is the bearer of rationality set off against a chaotic realm of affects and particulars that must be placed under its sway. Nature, and all that is not the product of the ordering capacity of the subject, is rendered irrational and meaningless. What the modern subject is left with is an abstract set of ordering procedures without any substantive aims to guide it: As reason posits no substantial goals, all affects are equally remote to it. They are merely natural. 15

The domination of nature by the subject extends into the subject. If the subject is to be the absolute source of meaning (and it asserts its identity as this source through the domination of nature) it must also dominate any trace of nature within itself: In order to escape the superstitious fear of nature, enlightenment has presented effective objective entities and forms without exception as mere veils of chaotic matter and condemned matter’s influence on the human agent as enslavement, until the subject, according to its own

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concept, had been turned into a single, unrestricted, empty authority. The whole force of nature became a mere undifferentiated resistance to the abstract power of the subject. 16

The autonomy of the subject requires that its thinking not be affected in any way by physical, natural impulses. The pure autonomy demanded by ethical formalism is the obvious target of Adorno’s criticism. In its rejection of the guidance of anything other than its own a priori structure, transcendental reasoning, despite Kant’s efforts to the contrary, becomes merely instrumental, capable of being driven by inhuman aims. The flaw in Kantian formalism becomes manifest when its procedures can be adapted for the purposes of Sade’s Juliette. Along with the abstraction from the empirical subject, the transcendental subject loses purpose: To be free of the stab of conscience is as essential to formalistic reason as to be free of love or hate. 17

The only disposition suitable to moral reason is apathy. Only this stoical attitude can shelter moral reason from the confusion of the affects. This new form of bourgeois stoicism “makes it easier for the privileged to look what threatens them in the eye by dwelling on the suffering of others.” 18 To be sure, the ethical formalism of Kant was intended, above all, to avoid the reduction of ethics to instrumentality. 19 One of the formulations of the categorical imperative enjoins us to treat others as ends in themselves and never merely as means; however, the endeavor not to treat others as means miscarries when it is not tied to the concern for the embodied, empirical persons who would suffer the fate of reduction to mere instruments. The Kantian imperative is driven preeminently by respect for the moral law, not by fellow feeling or by the visceral revulsion felt in the face of the effects of evil on particular human lives. BOURGEOIS COLDNESS: ADORNO’S PROXIMITY TO NIETZSCHE The terror behind the bourgeois subject, its coldness and its capacity for exploitation behind the veil of universal rationality, was, according to Adorno, unmasked in Nietzsche’s works. Nietzsche could see the hypocrisy of bourgeois ideals, but instead of lamenting the operation of power, affirmed it. In this way Nietzsche is both one of the most astute critics of the modern subject and its greatest proponent. Adorno writes, Nietzsche maliciously celebrates the powerful and their cruelty when it is directed “outside their circle,” that is, against everything alien to themselves. 20

Adorno suggests that the brutality of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power is the culmination of the enlightenment subject without illusions.

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It is the transcendental subject that thinks moral and political matters through the ideal of stability, an ideal accompanied by the power and effective strategies required for its consummation. Adorno helps us to see that the distance between Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power and the conceptualization of the world through the modern subject in its quest for mastery and possession of nature is not so great. In fact, despite his most profound effort, Nietzsche offers another formulation of thinking from the perspective of the modern subject, from the strong, impervious, center of power. Adorno’s analysis allows us to see the workings of enlightenment demythologization at its height in Nietzsche; for the subject that has rendered the world around it meaningless and chaotic, and sees meaning only in its imposition of order, is the hallmark both of the enlightenment subject and of Nietzsche’s philosophy. 21 Adorno writes, “To the extent that the understanding, which was formed against the standard of selfpreservation, recognizes any law of life, it is that of the stronger.” 22 Through the Nietzschean conception of value, we can see the frank expression of what was hidden in enlightenment moral theory—the assault on compassion as a vice, and the exaltation of coldness: “It is the weak who are guilty, according to Nietzsche’s doctrine, since they use cunning to circumvent the natural law.” 23 Adorno sees in Nietzsche’s praise of warrior cultures and cruelty the residue of the idealism that Nietzsche so vehemently criticized: [A]mid the twilight of the idols he [Nietzsche] cannot shake off the idealistic habit of wanting to see the petty theif [sic] hanged while imperialist raids are transfigured into world-historical missions. 24

In Adorno’s reading, Nietzsche is understood as a champion of domination, not its critic. In this regard, Adorno is able to draw parallels between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the intellectual underpinnings of Fascism: By elevating the cult of strength to a world-historical doctrine, German Fascism also took it to its absurd conclusion. As a protest against civilization, the master morality perversely upheld the oppressed: hatred of stunted instincts objectively exposes the true nature of the slave masters, which reveals itself only in their victims. But in the guise of a great power and a state religion, the master morality places itself entirely in the service of the civilizing powers that be, of the solid majority, of resentment and everything it once opposed. The realization of Nietzsche’s doctrines both refutes them and reveals their truth—a truth which, despite its yea-saying affirmation of life, was hostile to the spirit of reality. 25

Aside from Adorno’s willingness to see the Nazi regime as “the realization of Nietzsche’s assertions” on morality, this passage also exhibits Nietzsche’s central failure. His doctrine of master morality and will to

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power does not serve to revivify culture and thought. Instead, it “suppresses life” and is “inimical to the spirit of reality.” These remarks deserve serious attention in light of the interpretations of Adorno as a quasi-Nietzschean irrationalist. An interpretation foisted upon him by his former student, Jürgen Habermas. 26 They deserve our attention also because in Nietzsche, Adorno saw the brutality of the enlightenment subject emerging full-blown. We might, then, see in Nietzsche’s failure where the opportunity was lost to escape from bourgeois subjectivity. In Adorno’s view, Nietzsche’s thought “suppresses life” because of its refusal to allow compassion to play any role in the estimation of value. Nietzsche had nothing against compassion inter pares. Compassion toward the weak, toward those who are most vulnerable and least capable of the creative exuberance that Nietzsche so admired, is the rhetorical disguise of the slave revolt in morality. 27 While Nietzsche and Adorno are in agreement about the potential for overtly compassionate morality to be covertly oppressive, what motivates their respective critiques of modernity is fundamentally different. Nietzsche berated the enlightenment for its continuation of the slave revolt in morality, for continuing to impose equality on unequals. Adorno criticizes enlightenment for allowing oppressive inequalities to flourish behind the veil of a false, ideological equality. Nietzsche opposes the suppression of creative excellence by the principle of equality, which is, in his view a bad ideal. Adorno is shocked by the suffering that enlightenment has made possible, and he criticizes enlightenment for not making good on its promise of equal freedom and the betterment of life for all. It is not surprising, then, to find that their respective conceptions of what must be overcome in bourgeois society strike different notes. Nietzsche’s attack on compassion centers on what he thought needed to be overcome: the secularized residue of Judeo-Christian morality in enlightenment. These values, according to Nietzsche have served their purpose. 28 Judeo-Christian morality played an important role in the formation of the human psyche by turning our violent drives inward. JudeoChristian values, thus, gave us “depth,” and in overcoming them, we should lose none of their power for opposing and shaping instinct. 29 But the philosopher of the future must be able to take this cultivation beyond its traditional limits, and shed the last barrier to creativity—the JudeoChristian morality of pity. According to Adorno, it is precisely this move, the attack on pity and compassion, that renders the new morality of Nietzsche as reified as Kantian morality. Adorno criticizes Nietzsche for suppressing life and for adopting a mode of thought inimical to the spirit of reality. 30 What the modern subject lost epistemologically it also loses in the realm of morality and politics: contact with the particular, in this case, the material, feeling aspects of the subject. For what the Nietzschean warrior-artist

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must be able to silence (or, in a frenzy of amor fati, “affirm”) is the voices of those of the herd whom his project of dynamic self-creation might crush. Among the greatest dangers posed to moral thought by the modern subject is its frigidity—a product of the callousness of bourgeois society. 31 With the eclipse of compassion, the modern subject loses the capacity to think the most fundamental features of the particular and of its contact with other particulars, features which include, but are not limited to compassion, suffering with the other. The Stoic coldness required of the new morality, severs the contact between particulars that is life itself, according to Adorno. The sensibility capable of sustaining the contact between particulars as particulars in moral thought is compassion. And this is precisely what Nietzsche’s brand of stoicism has left behind. Life within the particular is also stifled as the visceral reaction to the screams of others must be stifled, atrophied. Nietzsche’s men of great things must be as hard as the Nazis who saw themselves as carrying out Nietzsche’s teaching. The masters perceive the herd as being atrophied, but precisely what has been atrophied is the feeling that might bring them into contact with “the herd.” Thus Nietzsche’s doctrine repeats the core legacy of bourgeois virtue—frigidity: Commiseratio is humanity in a direct form, but at the same time ‘mala et inutilis,’ that is, as the opposite of manly prowess which, from the Roman virtus by way of the Medicis down to the efficiency required by the Ford family, has always been the only true bourgeois virtue. 32

It is as well a legacy of enlightenment philosophy to extirpate compassion from moral thought. Philosophy’s penchant for universality and clarity could not bear the delicate attention to detail, with all of its ambiguity and uncertainty, required by a compassion driven morality: “Compassion did not hold out against philosophy. Even Kant himself made no exception in its favor.” 33 The yearning for identity, for a self-contained, imperishable intelligible structure in which thought and thing-thought, subject and object are one, is the intellectual expression of the subject that has dominated the world around it into a stable whole without fissures, and without the threat of the new and the different. Adorno has shown how this is intertwined with the distorted drive for self-preservation, its correlate selfaffirmation, the imposition of the subject onto the object, of form onto content. In enlightenment moral thought, identity and the human cost of its totalizing tendency are clearly evident. The morality that is thought from the perspective of the transcendental, content-less subject, whether it culminates in the attachment of the will to universal moral maxims or the creative affirmation of the warrior-artist, results in a mode of moral evaluation severed from contact with the particular. 34 From this abstract position, moral thought loses its capacity to judge vis-à-vis particular

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circumstances and possibilities. So long as the inner positioning of the will is pure and universal, or so long as one has made one’s life decision in confrontation with the eternal return, the content of the decision matters little. 35 What the modern subject leaves us with is an ethics of inwardness; so long as the formal structure of the decision fits certain criteria, one may proceed in full confidence of the morality of the act in question. Adorno implies that there is a strong continuity between morality and politics, a continuity established in part by the infection of both by instrumental reason. In politics, the exercise of compassion, or the understanding of the particular, the particular case or exception as not fully subsumable under the law, must appear to the universalizing, identifying tendency of reason as arbitrary and irrational. The mechanical application of universal law eclipses compassion and convicts universal law as inhuman. Under this condition, compassion must see itself as arbitrary: It confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes. By limiting the abolition of injustice to the fortuitous love of one’s neighbor, pity [mitleid] accepts as unalterable the law of universal estrangement which it would like to alleviate . 36

The exclusion of compassion from the universal blocked the possibility for compassion to conceive of a transformed social order. Hence it was the advocates of callousness who were able to speak out for revolution: Just as the stoic indifference on which bourgeois coldness . . . has modeled itself was more loyal, however wretchedly, to the universal it had rejected than the compassionate baseness which adapted itself to the world, so it was those who unmasked pity who, however negatively, espoused the Revolution. 37

It was precisely the atrophy of compassion in the universal identifying tendency of reason that paved the way for Fascist politics: “The fascist masters of the world translated the vilification of pity into that of political respect and the appeal to martial law.” 38 The writings of Nietzsche are not apologies for fascism so much as they are brutally candid accounts of the barbaric tendencies at work in modernity. These “dark writers” were the first to uncover the divide between formal, instrumental reason and the political and moral hopes of the Enlightenment. As an unrelenting effort to unmask the tendencies within modernity, and its implicit identification of domination and reason, Nietzsche’s philosophy is an unequalled accomplishment. But instead of serving the aims of criticism, Nietzsche’s thought winds up “construing the very causeways of power,” and justifying the identity of domination and reason. 39

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MORALITY AND POLITICS The mark left by the correlative influence of identity thinking and instrumental rationality upon the subject dissolves the bonds of affective solidarity, and replaces affective bonds with subjugation to formal principle. 40 The political shape of this subjugation is the totality bound only by the imperatives of efficiency with utter indifference to the quality of the lives led under its constraints. In this instrumentalization of rationality, reason loses its human face, as it becomes severed from the affective, material, bodily dimension of human interaction. With the loss of a human, social context, reason loses its tie with the good, with that which might orient society toward human well-being. As rationality loses its connection with affects, the affects do not simply disappear. The passions that Kant deemed impossible to educate remain strongly influential; but they have been surrendered by formal reason to the realm of the irrational. 41 Formal rationality thereby cedes the passions to the forces of ideology and to the consumption engineering of industrial capitalism. Any ideological position can pick up the tools of instrumental reason and masquerade as rational and scientific. Severing rationality from the passions has made possible the marriage of irrational political aims and the technological power of instrumental reason, of ideology and science. In Adorno’s view, this marriage is not only possible, it is already woven into the fabric of subjectivity. It is this grouping of technological power and ideology that sets the stage for genocide. The security sought by the subject in its confrontation with nature becomes exaggerated when it fails to recognize the inevitable and radical incompleteness of its project—when, in Adorno’s language, the subject refuses to recognize that the world does not enter into our concepts without leaving a remainder. 42 Self-preservation becomes a dangerous distortion when it—in the name of security and control—refuses to face that which poses a permanent limit to the control of subjectivity: our materiality, fragility, and mortality. There is a deep deception and a profound distortion of reason itself which takes place when it no longer responds to our materiality, to the lives of particular persons whose lives and deaths weave the fabric of history and society. The imperatives of security and self-preservation are ultimately failures at the level of the particular. The version of rationality that seeks security—and the concomitant aim of efficiency—eschews the recognition of its own incompleteness, and separates itself from every reminder of its radical incompleteness. According to Adorno’s critique of modernity, the recognition of radical incompleteness is not irrationality, but the very spark of critical reason: the reason that can reflect upon itself and its situation, and lend a voice to the yearnings that arise out of our materiality. The demand that reason reconcile itself to its own history and to its material situation, the ideal of universal reconciliation is critical in the extreme and profoundly humbling for rea-

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son, as it presents an ideal that cannot be realized fully by the resources of reason and of human history. Modern subjectivity seals itself off from the challenge posed by the eschatological promise of universal reconciliation, with catastrophic consequences for ethical and political thought and practice. The capacity of reason to think the relation of concrete, feeling persons deteriorates, even to the point where genocide can wear the mask of rationality and muster all the forces of rationality in its service. VULNERABLE FREEDOM AND THE DISPOSSESSED SUBJECT The critique of modernity we find in Dialectic of Enlightenment is notorious for its seeming destruction of any point of ethical or political reference that might ground a normative theory of society. A resounding and sweeping negation of the core ideals and hopes of modernity is all that is left, if we follow Habermas. But this conclusion becomes questionable when we consider the other works Adorno was engaged in during the collaboration with Horkheimer that resulted in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s social research on the structure and effects of propaganda techniques and how to decode those techniques for the public seems at odds with the fatalistic tone of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Minima Moralia is better known for one of the most notoriously pessimistic claims of twentieth-century German philosophy (“There is no good life in a false one”) and far less often appreciated for its unrelenting optimism regarding our ability to shape ways of thinking and living that “displace and estrange” the administered world and its false images of the good life. The possibility of a critical subjectivity is the positive thread running throughout even the darkest of Adorno’s works. This critical subjectivity is plural, particular and without the guarantee or inheritance of a progressive humanity, but it is not opposed to the Enlightenment hope for a truly human future. The question of how such a plural, vulnerable subjectivity that never transcends its situation, embodiment and particularity can generate an ethics, a politics or norms that might guide practice is left open in Adorno’s works. The question of ethics as a personal undertaking and confrontation with distorted social norms is the central question Judith Butler addresses in Giving an Account of Oneself, in which she explores the theme of ethical violence in Adorno’s lectures on the Problems of Moral Philosophy. Morality only becomes a question through our experience of decaying social norms that have been outstripped by “the state of human consciousness and the state of human social forces.” When the collective ethos has lost its vitality and its organic appeal, “it can impose its claim to commonality only through violent means” and maintain an appearance of commonality only through violence. 43 Ethical violence has both a temporal and a logical axis. Temporally it is the claim of a past norm (now

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mythologized) on the present, which, Butler emphasizes, “seeks not only to impose itself on the present, but also seeks to eclipse the present—and this is precisely one of its violent effects.” 44 Along its logical axis, it is the claim of universality over the particular, a logic generated by “the social problem of the divergence between the [dominant] universal interest and . . . the interests of particular individuals.” 45 These two axes intersect insofar as the past that can impose itself with such force must be aligned with dominant forces in the present, but this alignment leaves the norms in question deracinated from their historical context and appearing “violent and extraneous” to the present in which they cannot be inhabited without coercion or “appropriated by individuals in a living way.” 46 Butler emphasizes that universality as such is not violent; it becomes so when it becomes ossified and “indifferent to the social conditions under which a living appropriation might become possible.” 47 When the universal functions as a necessary “precondition of democratic debate” rather than as a site or theme of democratic contestation, it severs its relation and responsiveness to the conditions of the living. Universality becomes violent when it claims the status of an axiom or template establishing the conditions of intelligibility from the top down, from the past onto the present, from the dead onto the living. Butler writes, “If no living appropriation is possible, then it would seem to follow that the precept can be undergone only as a deathly thing, a suffering imposed from an indifferent outside at the expense of freedom and particularity.” 48 Freedom, particularity, the “I” that gives an account of itself is not autonomous in the face of the social norms that are the very conditions for selfhood. Adorno and Butler both reject the notion that freedom is something we possess. We know it only through its vulnerability to loss. Adorno writes, “[B]eing free means that, if someone rings the bell at 6:30 a.m., I have no reason to think that the Gestapo or the GPU or the agents of comparable institutions are at the door and can take me off with them without my being able to invoke the right of habeas corpus.” 49 There is no criterion that would enable the subject to autonomously take possession of the social norms out of which it is woven, and thereby lend them legitimacy and justify their violence. Adorno conceives of freedom as grounded in heteronomy. His “new categorical imperative” is imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of moral reflection. 50

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The acknowledgement of heteronomy, of the vulnerability of the body, and, to use Butler’s term, a certain dispossession of the subject is the motive of the new imperative. In his own adherence to the new imperative, Adorno accomplished much in the rearrangement of thought and sensibility, but he gives us little regarding the translation of vulnerability into actions. His account of the heteronomous condition of the subject never develops into an account of how this dispossessed subject can “arrange its actions” and become politically efficacious. On Butler’s reading, Adorno can only take us to the point where we can think the torsion between the universal and the particular that obtains when norms cannot be appropriated “in a living way.” Morality is the experience of the divergence of universal and particular, the experience of the violent attempt to forge an identity between the two. 51 This evades the question of how the particular or the “I” who must appropriate norms in a living way is . . . itself conditioned by norms . . . that establish the viability of the subject. Thus opening up the possibility for political practices in which the particular is not effaced, but finds itself in political performance. The dispossession of the subject in Adorno’s account of ethical violence lends itself to a privative understanding of dispossession, the world that administers life by turning life against itself. The subject that can appropriate norms in a living way has to refashion the way it feels and thinks the world so that we might, at best, keep the violence of the administered world from hiding behind the veil of necessity. When dispossession is understood as a constitutive of subjectivity and agency, the possibility is opened for agentic dispossession: What I am trying to describe is the condition of the subject, but it is not mine; I do not own it. It is prior to what constitutes the sphere of what might be owned or claimed by me. It persistently undoes the claim of “mineness.” Mocks it, sometimes gently, sometimes violently. It is a way of being constituted by an Other that precedes the formation of the sphere of the mine itself. 52

The agency that doesn’t disavow the conditions of its emergence acknowledges its own heteronomy, its dispossession, as the ground of its own relatedness to others and to itself. The dispossession of birth, of death, the material and bodily conditions that keep the subject from being self-grounding, cannot be projected outside itself and vanquished. The political judgment of the dispossessed subject can never be a final judgment that abolishes our dispossession. Butler writes, Condemnation, denunciation and excoriation work as quick ways to posit an ontological difference between judge and judged, even to purge oneself of another. Condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the other as non-recognizable or jettison some aspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we then condemn. 53

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Judgment as condemnation tends to “purge and externalize one’s own opacity.” Of course, action requires judgment about what must be done in the face of what cannot be tolerated or permitted. But Butler insists that this judgment not eschew the recognition of one’s own dispossession and the dispossession of the other or others whom one resists and judges. 54 Against the kind of judgment we find in Žižek, in which vulnerability can find a language for itself and become agentic only through a grand act of revenge, Butler endorses political performances that do not disavow vulnerability by transforming it into rage—such as the militant body art of Guatemalan performance artist Regina Jose Galindo, who protested the presidential candidacy of Efrain Rioss Montt in 2003 by walking through the streets of Guatamala City “in a black dress carrying a white basin filled with blood”: She occasionally sets the basin down, dips her feet in the blood, drawing the attention of pedestrians, and then continues her processional leaving the traces of blood as she goes. The walk ends at the National Palace, the site where the military dictators ruled, where, confronted by a police line blocking entry to the building, she sets down the basin in front of them, dips her feet for the last time, and leaves them face to face with two bold footprints of blood. 55

Galindo’s work performs dispossession, bringing it into public consciousness by “[z]eroing in on those abject or hidden domains of bodily life that most people would prefer not to see. Galindo breaks down the preferences of her audience, shows them what they would not willingly take in, and exercises an artistic force of her own.” 56 Butler also embraces the potential for plural acts of performativity in which those groups excluded from the avenues of political and public representation interpose themselves, bodily occupying public spaces. This elemental form of democracy, in Butler’s view, has two important effects: one is articulating a voice of the people from the singularity of the story and the obduracy of the body, a voice at once individual and social; another is the reproduction of community or sociality itself as bodies congregate and “live together” on the street. They come to enact forms of interdependency, persistence, resistance, and equality that allow them to create a counter-socius in the midst of hierarchical and regulatory power regimes. 57

On the distorted normative terrain of the administered world, we are, at best, pre-ethical agents acutely aware of the fallibility of our moral position. 58 The bodily recoil in the face of injury and dispossession is woven into judgment as a motive and as a lingering uncertainty. We are poised to respond to dispossession with a justified rage against the very conditions of subjectivity and relatedness. In her reading of Adorno, Judith Butler sees this back and forth pull as Adorno’s “model of ethical capa-

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ciousness, which understands the pull of the claim and resists that pull at the same time, providing a certain ambivalent gesture as the action of ethics itself”. 59 In the administered world, the responses to injury are readily packaged and presented as fodder for our “resolute” moral stance against an injurious and threatening world. This moral resoluteness keeps the response to injury and suffering entirely within the moral narcissism of the administered world. As Butler puts it, “One seeks to preserve oneself against the injuriousness of the other, but if one were successful at walling oneself off from injury, one would become inhuman.” 60 With this, Butler illuminates the moral peril of Žižek‘s version of divine violence, which turns injury into a rage against the world—and heralds not an ethical revolution or transformation, but a more intense, spectacular and “resolute” repetition of the cycles of violence in the administered world. NOTES 1. The full implications of this central feature of Adorno’s philosophy will be discussed at length in chapters 5 and 6. The role of suffering in the motivation of thought is a theme running throughout Adorno’s works, but it is most clearly evident in the following quote from the introduction to Negative Dialectics: “Where thought transcends the bonds it tied in resistance—there is freedom. Freedom follows the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively mediated” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1973], pp. 17–18). 2. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 17. 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 64. 4. Ibid. 5. Adorno writes, “According to Kant, the homogeneity of the general and particular is guaranteed by the schematism of pure understanding, by which he means the unconscious activity of the intellectual mechanism which structures perception in accordance with the understanding” (ibid.). 6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 64–65; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 102. 7. This mistaken position is espoused by Paul Connerton: “What was criticized in Marx as an apotheosis of history is transformed by Adorno into a ‘diabolization’ of history. What was condemned in Hegel is once more turned on its head: radical evil— Evil as such—is promoted to the status of the World-Spirit. The history of salvation is replaced by the history of damnation” (Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980], p. 114). Martin Jay exposes the faultiness of this reading: “[A]lthough the burden of Adorno’s argument is that history is a ‘Satanic’ process of worsening oppression, he did occasionally evince a guarded hope for the sudden reversal of this trend. The utopian moment in Critical theory . . . was never entirely extinguished. Even Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in order to pave the way for a more defensible notion of enlightenment” (Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], pp. 263–264). 8. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 9.

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9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 65. 10. Ibid. 11. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, pp. 21–22. 12. In Gillian Rose’s work on Adorno, it is argued that Adorno’s work is largely a continuation of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism (see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno [London: MacMillan Press, 1978]). Adorno also makes this clear in Against Epistemology: “The analogy is inevitable with vulgar economic thought, which attributes value to goods in themselves and does not determine it through social relations. The mathematical method is artificial only in that it does not provide thought with self-awareness. But such artificiality directly transforms logic by magic into a second nature and lends it the aura of ideal being” (Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. Willis Domingo [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982], p. 65). 13. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: Modern Library, 1906), p. 81. 14. For an account of Adorno’s philosophy as an attempt to recover these empirical features of the subject, see Albrecht Wellmer, “Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime” in The Actuality of Adorno, ed. Max Pensky (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 112–134. See also, Hauke Brunkhorst, Theodor W. Adorno: Dialektik der Moderne (Munich: R. Piper GmbH & Co., 1990). 15. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 70. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 75. 18. Ibid., p. 76. 19. Immanuel Kant, Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill Co., 1959), p. 46. 20. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 97; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 77. 21. Consider the following passage from “What Is Noble” in Beyond Good and Evil: “Here we must beware of superficiality and get to the bottom of the matter, resisting all sentimental weakness: life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation …” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1966], p. 203). 22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 99; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 78. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 79; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 120. 25. Ibid., p. 79; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 120–121. 26. Habermas’s interpretation of Adorno is discussed at length in chapter 5. Habermas draws parallels between Adorno and Nietzsche in “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In general, Habermas characterizes Adorno as an heir and victim of Nietzsche’s attack on modernity. 27. Cf. Nietzsche’s distinction between noble and base suffering, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 154. 28. Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 74–75. 29. Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. 84–85. 30. For a different formulation of Adorno’s criticism of Nietzsche, see Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), pp. 96–98; Gesammelte Schriften IV, pp. 107–110. 31. See the analysis of this in Christian Lenhardt, “The Wanderings of Enlightenment” in On Critical Theory, ed. John O’Neill (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), pp. 34–57. 32. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 101; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 121. 33. Ibid., p. 102; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 122.

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34. Comparing the Nietzschean Overman to Kant’s autonomous moral agent, Adorno writes, “His [the Overman’s] will is no less despotic than the categorical imperative. Both principles aim at independence from external powers, at the unconditioned maturity defined as the essence of enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 114). 35. In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno criticizes existentialism for its lack of concreteness regarding ethical and political commitments: “It makes no difference to a follower to what he attaches himself at a given moment. He praises this as his capacity for enthusiasm” (Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973], p. 25). 36. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 80; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 122–123. 37. Ibid., pp. 80–81; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 123. 38. Ibid., p. 81; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 123. 39. Ibid., p. 81; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 123. 40. According to Adorno, because formal reason offers no support to the fundamental affective bonds of human solidarity, it is easier to rationalize murder than to condemn it. Ibid., pp. 74–75; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 135. 41. In his criticism of eudaimonism, Kant decisively severed moral rationality from the education of the passions (see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. trans. Lewis White Beck [Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1993], pp. 20–26). It is Adorno’s contention that the Kantian abandonment of the education of impulses, leaves this dimension of the subject at the mercy of social distortions. For an account of what sensibility suffers at the hands of late capitalist society, see “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94–136; Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 141–191. 42. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 5; Gesammelte Schriften VI, pp. 16–17. 43. Judith Butler. Giving an Account of Oneself, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 4; Theodor Adorno, The Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 17. 44. Butler, ibid., p. 5. 45. Butler, ibid.; Adorno, The Problems of Moral Philosophy, p. 19. 46. Adorno, ibid., p. 15; Butler, ibid., p. 5. “If it ignores the existing social conditions, which are also the conditions under which any ethics might be appropriated, that ethos becomes violent.” Butler, ibid., p. 6. 47. Butler, ibid., p. 7. 48. Ibid. 49. Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), p. 140. 50. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365. 51. Butler, ibid., p. 9. 52. Ibid., p. 78. 53. Ibid., p. 46. 54. Ibid., p. 44. 55. Butler, Dispossession: The Performance in the Political, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), p. 169. 56. Ibid., p. 171. 57. Ibid., p. 175 58. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 104. 59. Ibid., p. 103. 60. Ibid., p. 103.

THREE Mimesis and Political Violence

THE OBJECTIVE CONSTITUTION OF THE SUBJECT The Dialectic of Enlightenment traces the horrors of totalitarianism back to the structural flaws in the project of modernity, with a great deal of emphasis given to the ethical and political dimensions of this predicament. The closure of the subject toward its own nature, its materiality, desires and feelings is not simply a closure. The material dimension of the subject, and the hopes to which this dimension gives rise, are assaulted as the enemy of rationality and a threat to self-preservation. The identity principle prevents the acknowledgment of materiality within the subject, and so materiality is viewed as external to reason and opposed to the principle of self-preservation. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Adorno’s critique of modernity challenges the notion that reason and impulse are ontologically distinct. Modern philosophy identifies rationality with self-preservation—the fundamental principle of every living being—with a biological disposition interwoven with the fear, aggression and pleasure essential for survival. 1 After Adorno’s account of the primal history of the subject, we can see the ways in which the very highest accomplishments of the subject (moral autonomy, political liberty, the scientific control of nature) have worked against the ideals that those accomplishments supposedly embody. An advanced society can be swept into a collective project of horrific violence and destruction because of the fear and aggression already woven into its organizing principles. It would be contrary to Adorno’s appreciation of the contingency of history to say that this condition leads inevitably to genocidal politics, and this is not the political insight we should draw from Adorno. He does not leave us with a simple inversion of progress with each moment of history leading ineluctably closer to 43

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another Auschwitz. The administered world is the Sittlichkeit of the wrong state of things, an objective arrangement of institutions and practices that divides the subject and the world into opposed regions. While there is not a single conceptual distinction that captures all of these oppositions under one rubric, the privilege of security, certainty and power over what is vulnerable, indeterminate and opaque in the subject is the operation that Adorno variously termed “identity thinking” or “instrumental rationality.” The hostile tension that defines both subject and world creates an opening for genocidal politics, as entire populations become the receptacle for the hostility within the subject. The explosion of this potential onto the stage of history in Nazi Germany announced the need to reassess the most basic forces at work in the shaping of subjectivity. The present chapter deals principally with Adorno’s account of the grounding of human knowledge in the mimetic relationship between subject and object, and the fragility of the hold upon truth that this relationship provides. Mimesis is one of the fundamental themes within Adorno’s philosophy. 2 Put generally, mimesis is the imitative relation of matter and matter, nature and nature, the corporeal contact between subject and object in which the complexity of the object is not reduced but is preserved in the subject’s representation of it. 3 There is no metaphysical divide between subject and object, but a relation in which the subject is woven out of objective conditions, which are themselves mediated by the activity of the subject. In its most terse formulation, mimesis is the relation in which like knows like, in which equals know equals. 4 In Adorno’s words, mimesis is “the non-conceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other.” 5 Mimesis makes possible the articulation of the affinity of subject and object, of a sameness that is not identification. Differently stated, the mimetic relation of subject and object does not terminate in identity—the object is not reduced to the activity of the subject, nor is the subject reduced to the blind impression of the object. Mimesis articulates the knowledge obtainable within the “field of forces” that bind subject and object. 6 In this field, both subject and object are embodied, particular, and vulnerable to the ravages of time and sociohistorical forces. The mimetic, un-coerced “assimilation of the self to an other” has been meticulously repressed in the subject’s quest for greater mastery and control of nature. The mimetic mode of thinking generates a different epistemological standpoint, one that integrates sensations and impulses into the faculty of judgment. Adorno avers that reflection should never attempt to rid itself of its objective embodiment. The reflective distance between subject and object “is not a safety zone, but a field of tension. It is manifested not in relaxing the claim of ideas to truth, but in delicacy and fragility of thinking.” 7 Maintaining a reflective awareness of the vulnerability of our hold upon the truth is crucial for Adorno. Mimetic impulses

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are vulnerable to distortion, and can be reduced to mere miming or copying, caught in a cycle of the repetition of the same when they are not brought into reflection. Feeling and suffering are bound to particularity, the locus of protest against a history of domination. Mimesis delivers to thought a sense of shock at what domination has done to humans and to nature. For Adorno, this shock is the beginning of critical thought in the way that “wonder” was for Plato. 8 Shock registers the subject’s receptivity to the other, the different: “It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness . . . mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense” 9 Because of its capacity to be moved by the other, mimesis can offer an articulation of the suffering endured under domination and an intimation of how things could be different: “The memory trace of mimesis . . . anticipates a condition of reconciliation between the individual and the collectivity. And this collective remembrance is not divorced from the subject but actualizes itself through it.” 10 Hence, mimetic behavior gestures toward a telos that instrumental rationality has missed: the pleasure that is felt wherever life flourishes. 11 The telos of reconciliation between subject and object (humans and nature, individuals and society) is a condition toward which mimesis can only gesture under present historical conditions. While this telos is not achievable through a strategy for social transformation, this did not prevent Adorno from exploring the capacity of mimesis to generate a language in which the suffering of the subject and nature can be heard and its causes understood. POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND RACE Understanding the workings of mimesis offers possibilities for a critique of epistemologies that presuppose the hierarchical arrangement of subject and object—in which the subject’s own objectivity, and its corporeal contact with the object are forgotten. For it is precisely this contact, and the impulses out of which it is woven, that identity thinking suppresses as alien and hostile to reason. Adorno’s philosophy is nothing less than a reshaping of the problem of what evokes thought, of what demands philosophical concern. The shock that gives rise to reflection is not generated subjectively, it is evoked by our objectivity, by the sense that we are embodied, that the errors we make in how we conceive the world take their toll on human lives. We are driven to reflection because we live in the nexus of decisions and actions that are not reversible and so require all the seriousness and gravity of decisions whose effects will create unrecoverable losses. 12 It is the eclipse of this sense of unrecoverable loss that leads modern subjectivity to the endeavor to eliminate what does not fall under technological control, what does not fall under the norms of industrial capital-

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ism. Adorno offers us an analysis of how the subject’s potential for selfenclosure played a central role in Nazi anti-Semitic ideology. Adorno’s analysis shows that the Nazi myth of Jewish world-domination is the projection of a subject no longer capable of reflecting upon and criticizing its own projections. A subject that is not humbled by its materiality and not challenged by its own fissures and incompleteness, will come to see itself as the autonomous generator of all meaning and truth; it will come to see itself as the arbiter of history, capable of pronouncing the last judgment and separating the wheat from the chaff in human relations. The world of the modern subject is one of order, of means-ends functional relationships absent any mode of determining rational ends. To this extent Adorno’s analysis of the nature of modern reason is strikingly similar to that of Max Weber, who was perhaps the first thoroughly to analyze the divide in modern society between merely instrumental, bureaucratic reason and substantive reason, or reason capable of positing ends and goals. 13 Weber’s conclusion was that this divide is insurmountable. Modern society is left with bureaucratic reason as the paradigm of rationality; substantive goals can arrive only through the extra-rational influence of charisma. Adorno’s analysis enables us to see why and how the modern subject is so prone to wedding itself to irrational aims. When the subject has become the fabric of an exaggerated drive for self-preservation, and yet lives within and through an apparently stable set of conceptual relations and social bonds, it identifies its own preservation with the preservation of the extant order. Anything either within the subject itself or in others that grates against this order must be seen as the enemy, as the remnant of unconquered and hence dangerous nature. The potential for directing this hostility toward the social world has been exploited by fascist ideology, but the potential lies within liberal capitalism no less. The problem at hand is not any particular racist ideology, but the tendency to assault what does not fall under the category of the norm. 14 Why is the norm, as this is formed in modern developed, capitalist society generally, so prone toward racism? This is the more fundamental question that Adorno’s critique of domination addresses. Many German Jews believed that liberal democratic principles could protect them from the pogroms and persecutions they suffered under elsewhere in the world. Liberalism, however, is not immune to racism, but is, in fact, fertile ground for it. For, as Adorno points out, Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal. Race today is the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual, integrated into the barbaric collective. 15

Racism is, hence, one mode of the violent mobilization of the norm against the outsider, whatever the norm or outsider might happen to be.

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Racism is social through and through. The modern subject itself is structured in such a way that racism is a perennial possibility for it. While there are contingent historical reasons for why the Jews were singled out for annihilation by the Nazis, 16 Adorno points out that Judaism is not the sole or the necessary target of annihilation by the modern subject 17 . Insider-outsider hostility is capable of taking on a variety of different objects, just as, depending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, so each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm. 18

The progressive rigidifying of the insider-outsider boundaries is the dark side of the history of the subject that confronts difference with an imperative to dominate or annihilate. The marriage of technological efficiency and a sharpened tension between insider and outsider has created the historical conditions for the genocides of the last century. While Adorno focuses his attention of Auschwitz, he is also mindful of the way in which this marriage operated within European imperialism as the prelude to Auschwitz. ADORNO ON ANTI-SEMITISM The source of anti-Semitism, the desires that fuel it and turn the subject toward the annihilation of what is exterior to it, arise from the suppression of what is alien within the subject itself. The motivation for antiSemitism lies in idiosyncrasy within the subject—the uniqueness and difference that comes with its materiality. 19 Exploring and exposing this idiosyncrasy is the key to overcoming anti-Semitism. Adorno writes, “Society’s emancipation from anti-Semitism depends on whether the content of that idiosyncrasy is raised to the level of a concept and becomes aware of its own senselessness.” 20 Idiosyncrasy, lying outside the scope of the a priori structures of the subject and of normality, is precisely that in aversion to which the subject has been shaped. It is the remnant of untamed nature, the awareness or experience of which is repulsive to the subject and alien to the structures of reason. In idiosyncrasy we see that which the subject has failed to integrate, and that which can affect the subject imperceptibly, unconsciously. Adorno refers to “idiosyncrasy” in his discussion of anti-Semitism in the same sense that he uses the term non-identical elsewhere in his works. 21 Idiosyncrasy is that which inheres in the particular and has not passed into concepts—into the universal, abstract, a priori structures of the subject, and which cannot be articulated or understood through the modern subject. Idiosyncrasy hearkens back to the origin of the subject,

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“moments of biological prehistory: danger signs which made the hair stand on end” and arouse reactions that expose that over which the ego is not in complete control. 22 As we saw in the foregoing chapters, the subject is intensely averse to the thought of its own materiality and all that this entails. In the visceral, bodily reaction to the world, Adorno finds that remnant of contact with things that is hidden by modern subjectivity. In such experiences the intimation of felt contact with nature is manifest: “For a few moments they mimic the motionlessness of surrounding nature.” 23 Here we find the remnant of mimetic impulses within the subject, in its proximity to nature, in its vulnerability: “Protection as petrified terror is a form of camouflage. These numb human reactions are archaic patterns of self-preservation.” 24 We have already seen the itinerary of this mimetic impulse as it evolved into an abstraction in the subject: 25 [A]s what is mobile draws closer to the immobile, more highly developed life to mere nature, it is also estranged from it, since immobile nature, which living creatures . . . seek with utmost agitation to become, is capable only of the most external, spatial relationships. Space is absolute alienation. Where the human seeks to resemble nature, at the same time it hardens itself against it. 26

What the mimetic impulse awakens is unsettling to the limits of the subject. The contact of subject and object is one of tension, the tension arising in the contact of the I with the not-I. And yet it is a contact of like to like. The response is elicited by the object, by the not-I. The object is not simply posited by an autonomous subject, it is responded to, mimed, but not copied by the subject. Because the subject’s mimicry is tethered to selfpreservation, it aims at releasing the tension occasioned by contact with the object, the not-I. The normalization of mimicry through ritual practice occludes this tension and produces the formal processes of subjectivity. The subject is formed through the ossification of contact with the not-I, through the repression of mimesis. This contracting of the range of mimetic responses is accomplished at first in ritual practices and later by the regularities and laws of modern science: Civilization replaced the organic adaptation to otherness, mimetic behavior proper, firstly, in the magical phase, with the organized manipulation of mimesis, and finally, in the historical phase, with rational praxis, work. Uncontrolled mimesis is proscribed. 27

In place of the assimilation of the subject to nature—the taking up of what the object elicits in the subject, the subject becomes a structure of controlled, self-contained reflection.

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SELF-PRESERVATION AND THE MIMESIS OF DEATH The exaggerated imperative for self-preservation sets off a progression in modernity whereby “[b]odily adaptation to nature is replaced by ‘recognition in a concept,’ the subsuming of difference under sameness.” 28 The repressed, and hence unreflective, mimesis that takes place in the movement from primitive subjectivity to the modern cogito, is the mimesis of inanimate nature, of what doesn’t move or threaten, of what is lifeless, tensionless. This is the way in which the subject attempts to resolve the tension between I and not-I, to reduce the not-I to the I (the non-identical to the identical, the object to the subject). This reduction is not without its primitive mimetic aspects: Science is repetition, refined to observed regularity and preserved in stereotypes. The mathematical formula is consciously manipulated regression, just as the magic adaptation to lifelessness in the service of self-preservation is no longer accomplished, as in magic, by bodily imitation of external nature, but by automating mental processes, turning them into blind sequences. 29

The repression of mimesis in the modern subject is the attempt of the subject to eradicate that which threatens the existence of the subject. The lingering threat to the subject’s drive for self-preservation is its own materiality, which carries with it the inevitability of death. Adorno finds in the subject’s flight from mimesis, the effort of the subject to effect an adaptation to death. 30 This amounts to attempting to overcome the last remnant of particularity, the perishable nature of the particular. Particular humans come into being and pass away, but the impervious cogito remains. It remains, however, at the expense of contact with the particular: “the tribute life pays for its continued existence is adaptation to death.” 31 The hierarchical opposition established by the separation of the world into a masterly res cogitans and servile res extensa (the separation of the world into two distinct substances), and the effort of the ego to have complete mastery of nature culminates in the disembodied, denatured subject. 32 This separation transpires at the expense of the subject’s contact with itself as embodied and material. All of the material aspects of its being are repressed. Hence, with modernity, “All that remains of the adaptation to nature is the hardening against it.” 33 Modern subjectivity “adapts” to death, overcomes the threat of death, by eliminating from consideration that which is vulnerable to the violence of death: the particular. The subject can thus constitute meaning structures that are not threatened by the perishability of the particular. The generation of meaning through the contact of particulars is lost to the subject that separates and elevates itself above particularity. The concept, the universal, is the definition placed over particulars and is undisturbed by their vulnerabil-

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ity. By constituting meaning through the relations among concepts rather than relations among particulars, the subject severs itself from the mimetic relation of particular to particular, and imitates that which survives the annihilation of the particular: death—that which has as its very meaning the annihilation of the particular. The formation of the concept as a mimesis of death annihilates the significance of the particular, whose elimination is no longer a threat to the concept. This development does not merely take place in philosophy but has a social correlate: “In the bourgeois mode of production the ineradicable mimetic heritage present in all praxis is consigned to oblivion.” 34 The struggle of the modern subject to prevent any regression to mimesis leaves behind the memory of mimesis, and the capacity to recognize its workings in the subject: “The pitiless ban on regression appears like an edict of fate; the denial is so total that it is no longer registered consciously.” 35 The mimetic impulses that have been thoroughly repressed to the point of unconsciousness in the subject are recognized “in others, as isolated, shameful residues in their rationalized environment.” 36 These repressed mimetic features, or idiosyncratic features of the subject are indeed just that, repressed features of the subject itself. And it is the presence of these tabooed impulses that arouses revulsion in the subject, a revulsion which is projected onto the object. Adorno writes, “Such mimicry provokes anger, because it puts on show, in face of the new relationships of production, the old fear which one has had to forget in order to survive them.” 37 The modern subject’s separation from particularity makes a reconciliation of the subject with its repressed material elements inconceivable for it; the exclusions and repressions of the subject are justified as the conditions for rationality. Reason comes to require the silence of the suffering that protests against civilization as it is. The impulses that might fund such a protest in the subject are easily turned against emancipation. In the organized regressions permitted and channeled by fascist leaders, “Even the plaintive sounds of nature are appropriated as an element of technique.” 38 Vulnerability and discontent can as easily be used against the subject by becoming built into the mechanisms of terror and manipulation. The awakening of the bodily vulnerability of the subject can take place in technologically refined forms of torture and terror. 39 Even the manifest suffering of the victims can be taken as proof of their need to be exterminated: “The mere existence of the other is a provocation. Everyone else ‘gets in the way’ and must be shown their limits—the limits of limitless horror.” 40 This terror is directed toward the repression of mimesis in the subject, the repression of the contact that does not fully submit to domination. The enduring threat to the subject, the limit that it cannot overcome and that ties subjectivity inextricably to the body is death. If the elements of bodily contact with the world are to be fully repressed and forgotten in the subject, then even this must be glossed over, or turned into an instru-

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ment of terror. “Even the last resting place shall be none. The despoiling of graveyards is not an excess of anti-Semitism; it is anti-Semitism itself.” 41 Yet, even the most elaborate efforts of the subject to dominate and efface mimesis cannot succeed completely: The chaotically regular flight reactions of the lower animals, the pattern of swarming crowds, the convulsive gestures of the tortured—all these express what wretched life can never quite control: the mimetic impulse. In the death throes of the creature, at the furthest extreme from freedom, freedom itself irresistibly shines forth as the thwarted destiny of matter. 42

Mimesis is never absent; however, its workings can be concealed and distorted. FASCISM Mimesis is not simply a critical term or standpoint that assures truth, although awareness of it is a condition of truth. In fascism, we can see mimesis at work in the unreflective projection of the image of what is forbidden onto the Jews. Hence the dynamics of mimesis enable us to see in the Nazi image of the Jews, the very essence of Nazi character. The various characterizations of the Jews were what the Nazis refused to see within themselves and projected outward onto the scapegoat minority. “There is no anti-Semite who does not feel an instinctive urge to ape what he takes to be Jewishness. The same mimetic codes are constantly used.” 43 The Nazi caricature of the Jew is the projection of elements within the subject that civilization represses: In the ambiguous partialities of the sense of smell the old nostalgia for what is lower lives on, the longing for immediate union with surrounding nature, with earth and slime. . . . In civilization, therefore, smell is regarded as a disgrace, a sign of the lower social orders, lesser races, and baser animals. 44

What lies hidden in the fascist is the desire to act out the forbidden impulses: “The anti-Semites father to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them a collective.” 45 In Fascist mimesis, the repressed elements of the subject are unconsciously mobilized for the sake of domination. Adorno refers to the fascist manifestation of mimesis as “mimesis of mimesis.” In the mimesis appropriated by fascism the relation of like to like is affirmed through the dehumanization of subject and object, through which the Jews are reduced to the detestable sub-humans that Nazism takes them to be. Through the appropriation of mimesis by domination, the emancipatory potential of mimesis is closed off in the

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mimetic contact of sub-human oppressors and victims who are reduced to the sub-human projection of their oppressors before being annihilated: The elaborate symbols proper to every counterrevolutionary movement, the death’s heads and masquerades, the barbaric drumming, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are so many organized imitations of magical practices, the mimesis of mimesis. 46

The dehumanizing politics of Fascism is the extension into politics of the totalizing tendency of the modern subject, which is expanded to the point of utilizing the discontent that its repressions have created: “Fascism is also totalitarian in seeking to place oppressed nature’s rebellion against domination directly in the service of domination.” 47 The rebellion against repressed nature is the storehouse of the idiosyncrasies (pre-rational elements) of the subject that are mobilized in anti-Semitism: “the tabooed impulses which run counter to work in its dominant form are converted into conforming idiosyncrasies.” 48 The manifest barbarity of fascism is generated by the instrumentalization of the idiosyncrasies repressed by the subject; this instrumentalization generates a force whose potential for evil is limitless, and which takes on manifestations that far exceed the moral coldness of utilitarianism and political realism: Once the horror of the primeval age, sent packing by civilization, has been rehabilitated as a rational interest through projection onto the Jews, there is no holding back. It can be acted out in reality, and the evil which is acted out surpasses even the evil content of the projection. The popular nationalist fantasies of Jewish crimes, of infanticide and sadistic excesses, of racial poisoning and international conspiracy, precisely define the anti-Semitic dream, and fall short of its realization. Once things have gone so far, the mere word Jew appears like the bloody grimace whose image—skull and mangled cross in one—is unfurled on the swastika flag; the fact that someone is called a Jew acts as a provocation to set about him until he resembles that image. 49

In sum, the evil of anti-Semitism is generated by the “false projection” of oppressed and forbidden nature onto the Jews. 50 Tracing how the parallel distortion of mimesis and humanity has occurred is crucial for Adorno. It is by addressing this question, the general question of how mimesis is at work within every facet of culture and society, that he is able to find what was at the heart of the distortions of humanity that took place in Nazi Germany. The progression of the modern subject away from the awareness of its own materiality is understood through the conflict between self-reflective mimesis and false projection: If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself. If, for the former, the outward becomes the model to which the inward clings, so that the alien becomes the intimately known, the latter displaces the volatile inward

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into the outer world, branding the intimate friend as foe. Impulses which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object: the prospective victim. 51

Humanity is not in a position to be able to shed projection. The fatal flaw in the contact between thought and object lies in false projection. Adorno writes, “In a certain sense, all perception is projection. The projection of sense impressions is a legacy of animal prehistory.” 52 In our responses to the environment we cannot help reacting to the environment “regardless of the intention of the object.” 53 The habituation built up through history has “automatized” projection, limited our response to things only to those relations most useful for survival. The conceptualization of the object is the product of focused projection. 54 This focused projection requires critical reflection if it is not to degenerate readily into the false projection of the sort that operates in anti-Semitism. The self-criticism of projection is a difficult undertaking, as the subject must face the vulnerability and incompleteness of its hold upon the truth: “Between the actual object and the indubitable sense datum, between inner and outer, yawns an abyss which the subject must bridge at its own peril.” 55 The body and the senses do not simply “receive point impressions” that are neutral, passive, and actively organized by the synthesizing activity of the subject, pace Kant. Perception is itself laden with “concepts and judgments” with the projections of the subject. This presents a “gulf” between the subject and the object, which must be “bridged at its own risk.” The risk lies in the subject venturing beyond the received concepts and judgments with which the object is laden. The risks of this venture come from the resistance to the social sanction behind these judgments. The risks also arise from the subject’s transcendence of itself, of its secure boundaries. Hence, Adorno writes, “To reflect to the thing as it is, the subject must give back to it more than it receives from it”—the subject must return to the object the excess outside of the received concepts and judgments that limit it. 56 The resistance to these limits within the subject offers an opening for the liberation of the object as well. In this way the spontaneity of the subject frees the object instead of dominating it. The recovery of mimesis opens up the relationship of knowledge (of subject and object) as a relationship of like to like. It resists the coercive, hierarchical approach to knowledge in that mimesis understands the liberation of the subject as a correlate of the liberation of the object. When the subject “returns to [the object] more than he receives from it” this return is not simply an imposition of form reduplicating the domination of the subject. It is through attention to mimesis, to the materiality of knowledge that it can speak on behalf of the lost possibilities of the object, and the lost possibilities for human society.

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The requirements of mimetic political thought can be gleaned through Adorno’s treatment of fascist ideology and practice. The affects out of which political practice is woven indicate more about the character of political agency than abstract natural rights established in a theoretical state of nature. We are thoroughly cultural, historical and social agents who carry with us all of the contingency that those dimensions entail. Auschwitz is not a theoretical starting point for rethinking politics. It introduces radical doubt through an intimate encounter with the concrete circumstances and details through which it emerged. The study of genocide as a political phenomenon is inseparable from the study of ideology and how it takes hold in the emotional life of the subject. This approach does not psychologize genocide, but shows us how it typifies tendencies within the objective configuration of historical and social forces. NOTES 1. Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 137. 2. We should not discount as a mere coincidence that Adorno’s most lengthy discussion of mimesis takes place within the context of an analysis of Nazi ideology. It is important to note the political context of Adorno’s discussion of mimesis, and its capacity to shed light on political possibility (a capacity Adorno never doubted), are typically missed in interpretations of Adorno. For just one example, see Sheyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 219. 3. Mimesis opens up the potential for a non-coercive relationship of subject and object. It is important to note that mimesis functions as both an ideal of non-coercive thought and as a description of how the subject relates to objects, that this relationship is always reflexive—the subject’s projections are also its own structures and so domination of the object rebounds upon the subject. Mimesis functions, then, as a description of all modes of knowing no matter how distorted, and as an ideal of non-coercive thought. See Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), p. 124. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p. 329. 5. Ibid., p. 54. 6. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 72. 7. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 127. 8. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 82, 330. 9. Ibid., pp. 53, 245. 10. Ibid., p. 261. 11. “Subject and Object” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 247. 12. For an excellent treatment of the materiality of the subject in relation to postHolocaust political discourse, see Garth J. Gillan, Rising from the Ruins: Reason, Being, and the Good after Auschwitz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), pp. x–xi, 65–85. 13. Max Weber, Economy and Society. G. Roth and C. Wittich eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 85–86. For an account of Weber’s influence on critical theory, see Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in Max Weber,” in Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 201–226.

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14. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 138–139. 15. Ibid., p. 138. 16. Ibid., pp. 140–144. 17. Adorno clearly claims that any group might be singled out for annihilation or might assume the position of the annihilators, as the potential for racism is exacerbated by modernity itself. However, elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in many other works, he suggests that there are elements of Judaism that are especially recalcitrant to the forces of modernity (see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 17–18, 145–146). There are many other texts as well that strongly suggest this, and it is precisely the elements of Judaism that are recalcitrant to the dominating tendency of modernity that Adorno calls upon in his criticism of modernity. 18. Ibid., p. 140; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 195. 19. Ibid., p. 147; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 204. 20. Ibid., p. 147; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 204. 21. “Part of progressive consciousness . . . is the ability and the energy to raise these idiosyncratic or blind reactions to the level of consciousness and, indeed, even to refine them as theory” and “Progressivity can be experienced only through one’s idiosyncrasies, through idiosyncratic disinclination regarding words, regarding things.” Theodor Adorno, “On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness,” Telos 52 (Summer, 1982), pp. 100–101. 22. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 204. 23. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 204. 24. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 205. 25. A development which was not necessary, but a contingent development inimical to our awareness of mimesis. 26. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 204–205. 27. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 205. 28. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 205. 29. Ibid., p. 149; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 206. 30. Ibid., p. 148; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 205. 31. Ibid. 32. See Gunter Gebauer and Cristoph Wolf, Mimesis: Art, Culture, Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 285. 33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 149; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 206. 34. Ibid., p. 149; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 206. 35. Ibid., p. 149; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 206. 36. Ibid., p. 149; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 207. 37. Ibid., pp. 149–150; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 207 38. Ibid., p. 150; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 207. 39. Adorno is referring to technological refinements such as “the howling klaxon [of] the German flying bomb,” the purpose of which was not to make the bomb more accurate, but to provoke greater fear in its victims (ibid.). 40. Ibid., p. 150; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 207–208 41. Ibid., p. 150; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 208. 42. Ibid., pp. 150–151; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 208. 43. Ibid., p. 151; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 208. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 152; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 209. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid.; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 210. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 153; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 210–211.

56 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Chapter 3 Ibid., p. 154; Gesammelte Schriften III, pp. 211–212. Ibid.; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 212. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 154–155; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 213. Ibid., p. 155; Gesammelte Schriften III, p. 213. Ibid.

FOUR Identity and Genocide

Thus far we have followed Adorno’s attempt to illuminate the occluded material dimension of the subject, which offers access to the historical situation and possibilities of the subject. Adorno’s analysis is directed at the social, historical and philosophical developments that served to set the stage for genocidal politics. Without some treatment of the historical event to which Adorno’s philosophy is a response, we will miss the impetus and the gravity of Adorno’s thought. Close attention to the historical situation of Adorno's critique of modernity is essential for understanding his approach to dialectical thought. Identity thinking cannot be refuted from some point outside of history or in the name of some abstract "otherness" that it cannot contain or conceptualize. Its negation comes from within its own workings, from what it has done to human lives. Adorno's critique of Hegel (the exemplar of identity thinking par excellence) resonates with the criticism of Hegel that we find in Emil Fackenheim, whose immeasurable appreciation for the conceptual elegance of Hegel's thought could be dispelled only by his memory of the faces of the guards at Sachsenhausen. 1 To move beyond identity thinking, we need to look closely at those faces that so haunted Fackenheim, not because they sprang demonically from nowhere, but because they were the products and beneficiaries of the highest accomplishments of European civilization and history. Any movement beyond identity thinking must be a determinate negation of the “civilizing process” that leaves us so vulnerable to fascist ideology and propaganda. Absent this consideration, revolutionary politics risks the repetition of the brutal and costly movements that have scarred the history of the last century. Genocide requires the distortion of moral rationality specific to identity thinking. Even genocides as seemingly different as the Holocaust and Rwanda attest to the similar modes 57

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of thought and techniques of mass manipulation that are prerequisites for genocide, even when the physical technology involved is vastly different. Whether we consider the genocide of an advanced industrialized country or the agrarian genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda, their structural similarities concur with Adorno’s account of genocidal propaganda and distorted moral psychology. The separation of conceptual thought and moral rationality from human feelings and concrete relations is characteristic of what Adorno called identity thinking, or the identity principle. In this chapter we will examine the dynamics of the identity principle at work within the phenomena of genocide: the perpetrators, their actions, and the myths in which they believed, all bespeak an inability to permit sensibility to enter into conceptualization. Identity thinking permits the pristine illusion that thought can be severed from feeling. Behind the veil of identity thinking, the drive for self-preservation, security and power can motivate thought without ever becoming the subject of analysis. We could follow the lines of Wordsworth in looking into the Nazi atrocity as a time “when passions had the privilege to speak and never hear the sound of their own names,” for identity thinking is a long-cultivated confluence of passions that takes itself to be the final overcoming of all passions, feelings, impulses and human vulnerabilities. THE STRUCTURE OF FASCIST PROPAGANDA What most captured Adorno’s attention in German fascism was its uncanny ability to transform civilized people into “crowds bent on violent action without any sensible political aim.” 2 As with much of Adorno’s philosophy, his treatment of fascist propaganda is concerned with the dissolution of the individual. In this sense, Adorno understood fascism as the political expression of the self-destructive tendencies within modernity. Fascism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. It is not simply the resurgence of barbarity, it is a different kind of barbarity, produced by the exigencies of modern society: “As a rebellion against civilization, fascism is not simply a recurrence of the archaic, but its reproduction in and by civilization itself.” 3 Adorno makes use of Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to group behavior to gain access to the dynamics of the dissolution of the individual in mass political movements. In the formation of the mass or group, the empirical individual is left behind as desire becomes invested in an abstract entity. The question posed by the mass appeal of fascism is how the members of a modern civilized country, could be susceptible to fascist propaganda—and to the forces that work to dissolve the individual into a member of a mass or collective bent on destruction. Following Freud, Adorno contends that “the bond that integrates individuals into a mass is libidinal.” 4 Hence the dynamics of mass formation must be understood

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in terms of the pleasure principle, “the actual or vicarious pleasure individuals obtain from surrendering to a mass.” 5 The needs and desires of the empirical self are stifled by the exaggerated logic of self-preservation. In fascism, the collective is bound by love, but this love is idealized and abstract. The materiality of love is obscured in the power of suggestion that binds the masses. They are to love an abstract entity, the Fuhrer, the Reich, the Volk, and this abstract entity takes up the space of the “primal father” toward whom only masochistic obedience is possible— because the abstract unifying ideal entity is disembodied and hostile to the feelings and particularities of the person. 6 The evocation of the primal father imago taps into pre-oedipal, archaic potentials for identification: The primitive narcissistic act of identification as an act of devouring, of making the beloved object part of oneself, may provide us with a clue to the fact that the modern leader image sometimes seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection of himself. 7

The abstract entity becomes the object of those desires unsatisfied in the empirical self. The desires repressed in the individual can gain vicarious satisfaction through identifying with an abstract ego ideal. And, thus, the individual might be utterly miserable, but “good,” because he or she is living in accord with the dictates of the Fuhrer. The Fuhrer, Volk, or abstraction becomes the ideal to which the individual’s desires become attached: The people he has to reckon with generally undergo the characteristic modern conflict between a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency and the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands. 8

The sacrifices requisite for following the dicta of the ego ideal inevitably leave the individual frustrated, for the aims of the Reich are manifestly at odds with the well-being of the individual. The demands of the ego ideal eclipse the needs of the empirical self. “This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses”—for the only satisfaction one can find is through identifying with the Reich, seeing its abstract aims as the “true” and “good” aims, as enlargements of oneself. 9 In this enlargement the self is left miserable, but this misery is construed as “good” because it is “in line” with the demands and imperatives of the system or Fuhrer. Hence, the system becomes the repository of narcissistic impulses. The solidarity thus created is a caricature of true solidarity which would be solidarity among empirical selves. The leader, Fuhrer, must appear to be the satisfaction of that which is denied to the individual. “In order to allow narcissistic identification, the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic”—loved, but not loving, self-sufficient, independent, everything denied to the member of

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the collective. 10 In opposition to this, the leader must also appear average: For the sake of those parts of the followers’ narcissistic libido which have not been thrown into the leader image but remain attached to the follower’s own ego, the superman must still resemble the follower and appear as his enlargement. 11

The store of dissatisfied desires is turned into rigidified hierarchy and ingroup/out-group hostility. 12 Though such hostilities have always been present, the technology of propaganda intensifies them to the extent that anything that is outside or alien to the enlarged self “elicits rage” sufficient to provoke the utter destruction of the outsider. 13 Similar hostility is directed toward those within the group as distinctive qualities within the group are leveled down: “The undercurrent of malicious egalitarianism, of the brotherhood of all-comprising humiliation, is a component of fascist propaganda and fascism itself.” 14 Fascism is not a disruption of capitalist society, it is largely a continuation, a building upon the social psychological features extant in capitalist society; hence, “Fascist propaganda has only to reproduce the existent mentality for its own purposes.” 15 It is nothing more than an “internalization of the irrational features of modern society.” 16 For it is the basic features of modern society and modern rationality that have effected the separation of impulse and reason, and have left the impulses and desires open to distortion and attachment to irrational political aims. Where rational aims cannot be generated, we find the distorted impulses of the subject gravitating toward myth, toward projections that cannot see themselves as such. This generation of myth is precisely what was at work in Nazi propaganda. Adorno’s analysis of the social-psychological dynamics at work in the perpetrators of the Holocaust convincingly accounts for the centrality of the myth of Jewish world conspiracy in uniting the Nazis in their attack on the Jews. The myth made the annihilation of the Jews a matter of morality, killing Jews was the moral and good thing to do. MODERN ANTI-SEMITISM Adorno’s analysis of the role of myth largely concurs with other studies of the Holocaust, which focus on the motivations of the perpetrators. In his classic study of the Holocaust, Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn analyzes the central role played by the myth of Jewish world conspiracy circulated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 17 Cohn notes that antiSemitism has a long history and is not unique to the twentieth century. Even the myth of Jewish world conspiracy is not unique, but has its provenance in popular myths of medieval Europe. Medieval myths about

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the Jews, however, did not enjoin Christians to annihilate Jews. The violence perpetrated against Jews in medieval Europe was different in kind, it was not inspired by “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” 18 It was not driven by the motive that the Jews as a race had to be eliminated. Cohn writes, As I see it, the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people, or even with racial prejudice as such. At its heart lies the belief that Jews—all Jews everywhere—form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind. 19

It was the myth of Jewish conspiracy that allowed the actions of the perpetrators to take on moral significance. 20 Extermination of the Jews was something one should desire and even feel good about taking part in: For many of the SS the conspiracy myth was in fact more than an ideology or world-view—it was something which took possession of their psyches, so that they were able, for instance, to burn small children alive without any conscious feelings of compassion or guilt. 21

The centrality of the myth of Jewish world conspiracy in accounting for the zeal with which the perpetrators engaged in genocidal activities is emphasized in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. 22 The concentration of Goldhagen’s study is on the motivations of the perpetrators, and his study is meant to contest the structural explanations of the perpetrators that ignore the uniqueness of the German commitment to genocide. Goldhagen writes, [I]t is necessary to eschew explanations that in a reductionist fashion attribute complex and highly variable actions to structural factors or allegedly universalistic social psychological processes; the task, then, is to specify what combination of cognitive and situational factors brought the perpetrators, whatever their identities were, to contribute to the Holocaust in all of the ways that they did. 23

The conventional interpretation of the perpetrators as unfeeling mechanical executors of orders from above cannot account, Goldhagen argues, for the creativity, zeal, and smooth efficiency with which the perpetrators engaged in their task. The Jewish world-conspiracy myth created a distortion in moral perception that made possible a genuine heartfelt commitment to the annihilation of the Jews a general character trait among the perpetrators: [T]he Germans’ belief in the justice of the enterprise caused them regularly to take initiative in exterminating Jews, by devoting themselves to their assigned tasks with the ardor of true believers, or by killing Jews when they had no explicit orders to do so. 24

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Although Goldhagen’s methodological aversion to social psychological explanations places him at odds with the methodological approach of Adorno’s studies in the structure of Fascist propaganda, his conclusions lie close to those of Adorno. For Adorno’s approach does not leave us with structures of human behavior divorced from the passions of the agent. The dispassionate agent of Kantian morality, for instance, is, according to Adorno, an illusion. The transcendental subject is the subject whose feelings have been made to identify with power, the oppressive power over the inclinations of particular individuals. 25 The analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment has shown us the destructive path of reason that has degenerated into domination. Goldhagen expertly accounts for the role of anti-Semitism in the agents of genocide, but his study is not focused on determining the complicity of deeply entrenched modes of thought in the emergence of genocide. He is acutely aware of the destructive and profoundly evil drives at work in the “civilized” individuals who took part in the annihilation of the Jews: German beliefs about Jews unleashed indwelling destructive and ferocious passions that are usually tamed and curbed by civilization. They also provided the Germans with a moral rationale and psychological impulse to exercise those passions against Jews. 26

But Goldhagen cannot account for why civilized people would be susceptible to believing in eliminationist anti-Semitism. He cannot account for why advanced civilization could be so ripe for such a distortion of moral sensibility, or why eliminationist anti-Semitism is unique to the twentieth century. Adorno’s analysis takes place at a different level, that of the struggle between humans and nature (reason and impulse, concept and object) and so is capable of addressing these questions and explaining the origin of the explosive passions ignited by anti-Semitism. The separation of impulse and moral reasoning is repeated in the testimony of various agents of genocide: it is such a uniform article of belief among the higher ranking members of Hitler’s SS that it almost seems to be the central flaw in the moral perception of the perpetrators of genocide. Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, exemplifies the distortions of moral perception that enter in when the sense of moral duty is utterly severed from materiality. In his autobiography, Höss describes how he was able to carry out his duties at Auschwitz: I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions got the upper hand. I had to watch coldly while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers. 27

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Höss’ autobiography is rife with such accounts of how he had to extirpate his feelings as he performed his duty. The actual practice of extermination, according to Höss, was difficult to endure, especially for those SS guards who had families. But the more emotionally and sensibly repulsive their own actions became, the more frantically they adhered to the abstract justification for their actions. Höss is a prime example of this. When his SS comrades asked him how he could endure the filthy work of the “final solution,” Höss responded, “[T]he iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler’s orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.” 28 His resolve was strengthened by Eichmann’s assurance that the final solution must be carried out “without pity and in cold blood . . . as rapidly as possible. Any compromise, even the slightest, would have to be paid for bitterly at a later date.” 29 The most prominent agents of genocide fit Adorno’s account of the dynamics of anti-Semitism and its facilitation by the structure of modern subjectivity. Also evident is the dark mimesis of perpetrator and victim. In order for Höss and his subordinates to rationalize and to execute their duty, they had to eliminate every trace of human feeling, both in themselves and in their perception of their victims. Eichmann’s advice was, essentially, that the voice of human suffering was not morally significant, and was an obstacle to their duty, which was to be carried out impassively. HUTU POWER PROPAGANDA In his “Meditations on Metaphysics,” Adorno exhorts us not to believe we can comprehend genocide as a learning experience of the species, and thereby derive some facile sense out of the victims’ suffering. 30 The genocide in Rwanda eludes our comprehension, not because the stories of the victims will never be told, or because the figures for those killed will never be known precisely, but because the very concepts we use to understand genocide are also its causes. Adorno’s thought allows us to analyze the subject for whom genocide is a meaningful political option. The problem is not that genocide is irrational; the problem is that, from the perspective of the political concepts that modernity has bequeathed to us, genocide makes sense; it is calculated, methodical and “rational.” Adorno was among the first to recognize the genocidal potential of modernity. In its conception of reason as an instrument for securing power over untamed nature, Adorno saw the epistemological shadow of a social and political order that tended toward the ruthless exclusion and extermination of all that failed to fit into its own self-conception, its own identity as a distinct people or race set apart from and above other peoples and races. Adorno’s analysis of the social context of subjectivity has long been recognized and valued as a source of insight into the cultural

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underpinnings of the Holocaust. His critique of modernity also has a great deal to tell us regarding the horrific repetition of genocide in a society as different from Nazi Germany as Rwanda. Adorno allows us to see the problem of genocide as it emerges from the structural flaws present not only in the modern state (or the “administered world”), but also in the process of political modernization itself, in the formation of a national identity—a process that continues to unfold at a terrible human cost in Rwanda (and in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in many other regions in Africa and throughout the world in which ethnic differences and tensions are mobilized for political purposes). Adorno’s critique of modernity is indispensable for understanding this phenomenon as a flaw in the process of national identity formation. In his essay on the “Elements of Anti-Semitism: the Limits of Enlightenment,” Adorno 31 reveals the political effect of the modern subject’s frustrated attempt to dominate nature both outside and within itself in its quest for a single homogenous criterion for rationality. The political expression of this frustrated quest can take the form (as it did in the cases of Nazi Germany and Rwanda) of a program to create an ethnically pure homogenous political space, in which the very existence of different peoples becomes the political problem. Reading Adorno’s treatment of antiSemitism along with an analysis of “Hutu Power” propaganda and the political motivation of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide reveals fundamental similarities in the structure of Nazi anti-Semitism and extremist Hutu propaganda, and these similarities indicate the structure of the subject that can take up genocide as a political option. Understanding the recurrence of genocide requires an analysis of the subject of genocide and how the structures of that subject are interwoven with extreme nationalism of the sort that emerged in Rwanda. We also need to understand how these structures are at work in the formation of national identity in the aftermath of colonialism, in which ethnicity was explicitly politicized, defined and focused as a strategy for exercising power over the governed. The events in Rwanda were made possible by a political subject capable of bringing the decision about the existence or non-existence of entire populations within the scope of political practices and institutions 32 (a decision that now structures the central political question for a growing list of developing and stressed nations). To understand this situation, we need to address not only the political concepts and theories that modernity has bequeathed to us, but also how these concepts are interwoven with (and mediated by) regional social and political practices.

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GENOCIDE AND MODERNITY If there is a single claim implied throughout Adorno’s works insofar as they bear upon political questions, it is that we cannot understand genocide without understanding modernity and the possibilities generated by modern conceptions of the subject and of politics. Adorno’s gift for seeing the social forces woven into every fold of the most recondite epistemological theory is that for which he is most often recognized. The terrain on which Adorno can provide the most guidance is in the intersection of epistemology and politics where the relationship between rationality and domination is most starkly evident. The link between epistemology and politics was not at all lost on the philosophers of the Enlightenment, nor was this link lost on Adorno. And yet we rarely mine his social critique of epistemology for insight into politics, even as we watch the strained attempts to build a nation state become transformed into genocidal campaigns. In “Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno tells us that genocide has its roots in the “aggressive nationalism” of the twentieth century. 33 What features of the constitution of national identity tend toward this extremity is a subject Adorno and Horkheimer address explicitly in the “Elements of Anti-Semitism: the Limits of Enlightenment,” but it is also implied throughout Adorno’s treatment of the opposition between reason and nature in modernity. 34 It is all too easy to see on the surface of fascism the antipode of the Enlightenment ideals of human emancipation and rationality. After all, the political sphere, established by the social contract, marked our freedom from the violence of the state of nature and exposed the illegitimacy of arbitrary limits imposed upon human freedom. The modern state is the space within which the interests of individuals are rationally balanced in a way that ensures stability and entails our radical equality before the law. It is this inheritance that leaves us so paralyzed in our attempt to understand how the concept of race could enter so decisively into modern politics. Adorno notes this paralysis is what prevents liberalism from understanding its own relationship to fascism. 35 Where fascism ignites upon difference, objectifies it, and makes of it a target for aggression, liberalism understands the persistence of ethnic difference as a failure to assimilate. 36 Liberalism is “true as an idea.” The unity of all peoples in “a society in which rage would no longer reproduce itself or seek qualities on which to be discharged” is true as an end that would satisfy the hopes of enlightenment; however, because liberalism erroneously believes the “society without aggression” to have already been realized by the social contract, it turns the idea into an apology for the aggression of the extant order, which, in spite of its ostensible opposition to the arbitrary violence of untamed nature, harbors an imperative for assimilation and conformity that is precisely the return of everything we had hoped to escape through the mastery of nature. 37

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What is implied in Adorno’s critique of liberalism is the failure of liberalism to understand the mediation of politics and violence. For the modern political subject, the violence of the state of nature is external to politics as such; it is the pre-political condition from which we definitively depart by entering into the social contract. Hence, the modern political subject is blind to the remnant of violence within institutions, within its own concept of the political and within the political order itself, an order into which it is drawn by the logic of self-preservation to secure itself against “death and wounds.” 38 But the security against the most horrific and inescapable traces of nature is ultimately unobtainable. The revulsion before the remnants of nature that have escaped the security of the political order remains and structures the subject’s projection of enemy images and its decisions about who is included in the scope of institutions and of justice. Whatever bears the reminder of filth, decay and corruption—reminders of our vulnerability and our inescapable bond to the nature over which the subject’s dominance is forever incomplete “is felt as intrusive and arouses compulsive aversion.” This aversive reaction, Adorno tells us, “recreates moments of biological prehistory” as it invokes reminders of a self that is not master of itself. 39 The subject recoils in the face of these remnants of uncontrolled nature, and the intellect recoils before them as elements that resist conceptualization. The subject’s aversion to these elements is one of its most “archaic patters of self-preservation”—its petrified fear in the face of qualities perceived as alien and threatening. The grafting of this aversion to nature onto the peculiar qualities of a given people, Adorno terms “idiosyncrasy,” and this, he tells us, is the dynamic we must understand if we are to understand anti-Semitism. Adorno writes, “Society’s emancipation from antiSemitism depends on whether the content of that idiosyncrasy is raised to the level of a concept and becomes aware of its own senselessness.” 40 This idiosyncrasy has its roots in the callous adaptation to the threat of death. 41 In its origin, this adaptation occurred through mimesis, the stillness in the face of the threat, blending into nature by mimicking nature. The mimetic relation of the subject to its surroundings was ordered and controlled at first through magic ritual, and later eclipsed through the ritual of rational practice. The increase in control over nature afforded by technology—the ritual of “blind sequences” and “automatic mental processes”—is had at the price of an increased hardening of the subject against nature, both outside and within itself. The modern subject is structured by the domination of nature and those remnants of nature within itself that remain beyond its control are externalized, projected outward. As the subject becomes more refined, its experiences processed and meticulously ordered, that which escapes this order becomes a repository for the subject’s aversion, its fear and aggression toward untamed nature.

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Adorno traces the aversion (even rage) of subjectivity toward all that is perishable and vulnerable as far back as Parmenides. The tradition of thinking through concepts free from the ravages of contingency, “identity thinking,” denotes a mode of thought removed from and resistant to those elements recalcitrant to conceptualization, to the reduction to controllable, repeatable phenomena, whose meaning is rooted in a foundation lying outside and above the contingency of human affairs. As we saw in chapter 1, the epistemological distortions of this approach result in the reduction of reason to myth: thinking through concepts that enjoy a quasi divine status, untainted by the social and historical conditions under which they were generated and within which they operate. When identity thinking enters into politics, the exaggerated quest for conceptual purity manifests itself as the exaggerated quest for security. This quest against the violence of nature is scuttled by the irrevocable remnant of nature in the subject, namely, its own mortality, its radical vulnerability. In this context, whatever doesn’t relinquish its particularity (its difference) deviates from the norm and can become a repository of the violent aversion to nature. This difference need not be the product of any difference in political view or any real opposition of interests—as there was no real political opposition presented by the Jews of Europe. While the reasons why a given group becomes an object (or agent) of genocide are always historically, socially and politically mediated, Adorno avers that no group is immune from becoming so designated: [D]epending on the constellation, the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, so each of them can replace the murderer, in the same blind lust for killing, as soon as he feels the power of representing the norm. 42

Just as political conditions can allow any group to be marked for annihilation, any group can become the agent of annihilation, as the projection and the object of annihilation is the subject’s own radical vulnerability, the remnant of nature that forever frustrates the subject’s logic of selfpreservation. From this view, Adorno’s analysis allows us to see that the destruction of Jewish graveyards wasn’t merely one act of anti-Semitic violence, it was the essence of anti-Semitism; as anti-Semitism was the political face of the subject for whom the constitution of meaning requires that every trace of human vulnerability be extinguished. THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN RWANDA The structures Adorno reveals in his analysis of anti-Semitism becomes pronounced in emerging and stressed nations, and are hauntingly similar to the situation of nations scarred by indirect rule and colonization, conditions under which ethnicity was used as a political instrument, biolo-

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gized and “racialized” in order to justify the unequal proximity to power enjoyed by the ethnic groups favored and utilized as instruments of government by the colonial powers. 43 When we consider the differences between the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda and that of the Jews in Europe, they at first seem starkly different, at least regarding the instruments of genocide and the role played by industrial technology. The crucial similarity is in the mechanism by which the Hutus transformed the Tutsis into objects of genocide. We see this mechanism at work in Hutu Power propaganda, in which the very name “Tutsi” became a cipher for disease and death and the elimination of the Tutsi became an eschatological project that would definitively heal the wounds of Rwanda’s past, binding the Hutus as a people and Rwanda as a unified nation. The architects of the Hutu Power were able to actualize the very worst possibilities of the modern political subject in a project to form an ethnically homogenous political identity, and thus bring about a technological solution to the historical problem of Hutu and Tutsi difference. The propagandists exploited the potential for the subject’s aggressive adherence to security and to a single criterion for political membership and rationality. In face of this goal, the power sharing plan of the Arusha Agreement of August 1993—which would have instituted greater representation for the Tutsi in what was largely a Hutu dominated government—could appear only as the threat of disintegration. In the several years leading up to the genocide in Rwanda, Hutu propaganda saturated the available media outlets (principally radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines and pamphlets) which were controlled largely by the “akazu”—the inner circle of the Hutu power movement within the Rwandan government. The media in Rwanda operated under a supurious “freedom of the press” which allowed those in the government to disavow the content of the broadcasts. 44 The domination of the media by shadow organizations affiliated with Hutu extremism allowed their message to be the principal force in shaping the political consciousness of the nation. The fundamental theme woven through Hutu propaganda was the assumption—ingrained in Rwandan culture by the Belgian colonial power—that Hutu and Tutsi are different races. 45 The notion that Rwanda represented a unity of multiple ethnicities was attacked by Hutu propaganda as “a Tutsi trick to divide and weaken the Hutu by destroying their sense of ethnic identity.” 46 Mirroring the Nazi myth of Jewish world conspiracy, Hutu propaganda asserted the subterranean unity of all Tutsi: the fighters of the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), the pre-1959 Tutsi monarchy, and the Tutsi living peacefully within Rwanda were the agents of a conspiracy to restore the Tutsi dominance of the colonial and pre-colonial periods. All Tutsi were deemed invaders and combatants in this cause. As one antiTutsi publication asserted,

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“They are all linked . . . their evilness is the same. The unspeakable crimes of the [Tutsi] of today . . . recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women.” 47

In issues of Kangera, one of the more prominent Hutu Power publications, the terms Tutsi and RPF were used interchangeably, as all Tutsi became grouped into one coherent enemy image. 48 The myth of Tutsi racial difference and unity as conspirators was complemented by the myth of Tutsi’s as infiltrators insidiously compromising the boundaries of the nation, of the government and of Hutu blood and race. In accord with Hutu propaganda, “[when] Tutsi men failed to penetrate some aspect of national life . . . they sent in their women to seduce Hutu who controlled that domain.” 49 “Tutsi” became the name for any who contested the Hutu power agenda: moderate Hutus and anyone voicing sympathy for the Tutsi were “in fact” Tutsi who had changed their identity papers and now posed as Hutu. 50 Throughout the Hutu power message, the Tutsi were referred to as “inyenzi,” cockroaches, an infection, a disease. 51 The propaganda made intentional use of projection, making “accusations in a mirror,” attributing to the Tusi the true intentions of the Hutu Power movement. The propaganda warned that the Tutsi were too few in number to dominate the Hutu again without resorting to extreme measures. As early as 1990, the propaganda began repeating the accusation that the Tutsis intended to “wage a war that would leave no survivors,” and that the Tutsi “wanted to clean up Rwanda by throwing the Hutu into the Nyarobongo River.” 52 These “accusations in a mirror” proved to be terrifyingly prophetic of events to come and effectively exploited the violence inherent in the formation of the political subject’s identity and sense of community. Adorno’s work on anti-Semitism revealed the political mobilization of the dynamics of false projection through which it is possible for antiSemites to hate their projection of “the Jews” while imitating it in detail. 53 The subject is thus able to externalize the violence of untamed nature, to project death outside itself, outside the community, and to “eliminate” death through violence—in a dark mimesis of the very violence and aggression they projected outward. The subject finds its conception of the other confirmed as it transforms the object into a content fitting its projection—the Tutsi, ciphers of death, into corpses. And in this way the subject’s projection and its identity form a complete circuit; for the insider, there is no way outside the fantasy of identity, and for the outsider, integration now means death. This distorted strategy for community formation Adorno saw at work in the heart of anti-Semitism: “The antiSemites gather to celebrate the moment when authority lifts the ban [on mimetic violence]; that moment alone makes them a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits.” 54 The role of genocide as a per-

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verse form of communal bonding is noted by Phillip Gourevitch in his Stories from Rwanda: Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building. . . . As strange as it may sound, the ideology—or what Rwandans call “the logic”—of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. . . . Killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together. 55

The extremist Hutu’s succeeded, briefly, in bringing about a marriage of national identity and genocide: they brought Hutus together in a final solution to redeem the wounds of the past through the sacrifice of the Tutsi. THE PRESENT AND THE NOT-YET While we can see Adorno’s analysis of the structure of anti-Semitism repeated in the genocide of the Tutsis, the principal instrument of the genocide was quite different from the bureaucratic, military machine of Nazi Germany. The lack of industrial technology, however, did nothing to lessen the volume of killing in Rwanda: almost 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in just 100 days, grim figures that make the Rwandan genocide the most effective mass killing in history—and it was effected mostly by machete, face to face with the victims, and without the aid of industrial technology to create an emotional distance between killers and victims. Yet in both cases, we find an aggressive political subject and a perverse image of community building through collective violence. Also, the notion that the agent of genocide—whether the total state or the barely emergent national identity—is also the agent of redemption within the cultural narrative. The psychology of sacrifice, at the core of Adorno’s treatment of anti-Semitism offers an explanation of why the genocidal subject must see itself as quasi-messianic, both sacrifice and redeemer. This structure of self-absolution, apparent both in the Holocaust and in the Rwandan genocide plays a central role in silencing the suffering of the victims of genocide, as their destruction plays a central role in the creation and preservation of a distinct national identity. Given the insight Adorno has to offer into political concepts and practices and the proximity of these practices to genocide, the general criticism of Adorno as a political quietist seems odd. While Adorno doesn’t offer a positive political program for reshaping institutions, he hardly leaves us with a politics in which there is no contingency in human affairs and no possibility for meaningful resistance and for checking the genocidal tendencies of modern institutions and practices. 56 Politics is woven out of contingency, as it is a tissue of human choices and decisions, and while the scope of these choices might not present us with the possibility

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of the radically new, we may still reserve the hope to avoid the very worst. We have seen in closer detail the concrete political effects of knowledge severed from particularity, rationality severed from sensibility, concepts severed from human relations. It is in response to these effects, to the horrific human cost of such thinking, that Adorno attempts to reorient philosophy, knowledge, and rationality toward the non-identical, toward the feeling, sensibility, and complexity of human-to-human relations—this is precisely what needs to be brought into thought, in such a way that its pretensions to identity are humbled by the recognition of the non-identical, of the flesh that is wedded to the spirit. Adorno’s thought is fundamentally a response to the horror of the Holocaust, of the breakdown of relations between person and person, it is meant to formulate a way of thinking that will prevent the repetition of genocide. Adorno’s thought is, in this sense, profoundly political. To break through the compulsion of identity thinking, to turn thought toward the non-identical, we must be inspired by aims higher than those of security, self-preservation, or efficiency—those ideals on which rationality rested and deteriorated in modernity. Against the dead end that these ideals led to, thought must take risks, it must set a higher standard for itself, it must be able to think that which traditionally has been cast out of philosophy—the particular, the ephemeral and the vulnerable. Our visceral reaction to the horror of evil must be allowed to make inroads on how meaning is constituted. Meaning must confront that which undermines it, and maintain it in its meditations without resolving it, without attempting to justify it. Adorno’s dialectic keeps the concept and object in tension, generates the deep self-criticism that philosophy and every feature of human life must undergo after the Holocaust. Intellectual ideals that fall short of this and rest content with domination, with the notion that what the concept has excluded in its endeavor to control the object is of no importance, or that the domination of nature extant in the sciences will not have its effect on other areas of cognition, close off the radical self-criticism that universal reconciliation inspires. We can, after our treatment of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, see how the exclusion of sensation from thought, of suppressed nature from concepts, is dangerous in the extreme: the dark marriage of science and genocide, of abstract rationality with the “morality” of extermination, of desire reinvested in abstractions. In light of such horrors, the vocation to lend a voice to what concepts have excluded bears all the hallmarks of reason in opposition to the manifest irrationality of the Holocaust. Only by refusing to let go from thought that which the course of history and events has stifled—by refusing to let lost possibilities for human happiness go un-thought and allowing possibility to challenge the legitimacy of what is at present—can reason regain its relation to human emancipation and regain some of the

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promise of enlightenment. But universal reconciliation does not provide for us a realizable set of goals, a clear program for action, or a strategy for political revolution. It is this distance between universal reconciliation and practice that has inspired the familiar criticism that Adorno sets the standard of criticism too high: that he has left us with a utopian ideal incapable of guiding practice in a world hopelessly distant from reconciliation. In short, some of Adorno’s critics claim that he has reverted to theology and left critical theory behind, and in reverting to theology, has lapsed into irrationality. Does Adorno’s eschatological ideal of universal reconciliation leave us in the position of uttering an abstract “no” to the world as it is, does it lead to nihilism, in that it can only destroy meaning as it is; from the perspective of such a utopian ideal, are not all cows black, all institutions infinitely distant from things as they could be, all infinitely distant from the messianic or utopian condition? We now turn to the relationship between eschatology and the discernment of possibilities in the world, or, rather the relationship between eschatology and reason, and the question of how conceptual thought can operate in the tense space between the present and the not yet. NOTES 1. While Fackenheim’s refutation of Hegel from particularity can be construed as an instance of Adorno’s non-identical thinking, Fackenheim found a very different and ultimately Heideggerian way of developing this refutation philosophically. See Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1980), pp. 105, 108–111. 2. Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt eds. (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 118. 3. Adorno, “Fascist Propaganda,” p. 122. 4. Ibid., p. 121. 5. Ibid., p. 122. 6. Ibid., p. 124. 7. Ibid., p. 125. 8. Ibid., p. 126. 9. Ibid., pp. 129–130. 10. Ibid., pp. 126–127. 11. Ibid., p. 127. 12. Ibid., p. 128. 13. Ibid., p. 130. 14. Ibid., p. 131. 15. Ibid., p. 134. 16. Ibid., p. 134. 17. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 18. This term is from the recent study of the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 19. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 16. 20. While their studies differ on several points, Goldhagen is fundamentally in agreement with Cohn on this point. The Jewish conspiracy myth was instrumental in

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reshaping the moral perception of the perpetrators. Goldhagen writes, “The systematic cruelty demonstrated to all Germans involved that their countrymen were treating Jews as they did, not because of any military necessity, not because German civilians were dying in bombing raids. . . . Not for any traditional justification for killing the enemy, but because of a set of beliefs that defined the Jews in a way that demanded Jewish suffering as retribution, a set of beliefs which inhered as profound a hatred as one people has likely ever harbored for another.” Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 389. 21. Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 214. 22. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 407. 23. Ibid., p. 409. 24. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 395. 25. Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 231ff. 26. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 397. 27. Bewinska, Jadwiga and Danuta Czech, eds. KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS (New York: Howard Fertig, 1984), p. 104. 28. Ibid., p. 105. 29. Ibid. 30. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 361. 31. These essays appear in Dialectic of Enlightenment and were co-written with Max Horkheimer. 32. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1. (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 137. 33. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 192. 34. Deborah Cook. Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), p. 127. 35. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 138. 36. Ibid. 37. “Race is not, as the racial nationalists claim, an immediate, natural peculiarity. Rather, it is a regression to nature as mere violence, to the hidebound particularism which, in the existing order, constitutes precisely the universal.” (Ibid.) 38. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Chapter XIII, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind Concerning their Felicity and Misery.” 39. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 148. 40. Ibid., p. 147. 41. Ibid., p. 148. 42. Ibid., p. 140. 43. See Mahmood Mamdani, “The Racialization of the Hutu/Tutsi Difference under Colonialism” in When Victims Become Killers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 76–102. 44. Allison DesForges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 67. 45. Ibid., p. 72. 46. Ibid., p. 73. 47. Ibid., pp. 73–74. 48. This “time collapse” that creates an exaggerated sense of identity for the object (the targeted group) of genocide renders race an essence, a historyless quality that captures the enemy under one concept. Time collapse also occurs for the perpetrator group’s sense of identity as well. See Vamik Volkan, Blood Lines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), p. 67.

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49. Ibid., p. 75. 50. Ibid. 51. This in part accounts for the ubiquity of rape during the genocide, as Tutsi women were the cultural point where the boundary between Hutu and Tutsi was frequently blurred through intermarriage. As Christopher C. Taylor writes, “Tutsi women were pivotal enemies in the extremists struggle to reclaim both patriarchy and the Hutu revolution, because in many respects they were socially positioned at the permeable boundary between the two ethnic groups.” Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1999), p. 155. 52. Ibid., pp. 78–79. 53. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” p. 151. 54. Ibid., p. 152. 55. Philip Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998), pp. 95–96. 56. In his lectures on moral philosophy, Adorno tells us, “[A]nything we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. We might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics.” Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 176.

FIVE Negative Dialectic and Democracy

CRITICISM OF ADORNO THE APOCALYPTIC The foregoing chapters have dealt with the historical and political context of Adorno’s criticism of identity thinking. The endeavor to ground the social world in a transcendent conceptual order effaces the complexity of life and endangers the lives of those who do not conform to this order. We can engage in a critical account of the objective conditions of subjectivity when we see the tension between identity thinking and the lives and bodies of those whom it has rendered expendable. We can move beyond identity thinking only in solidarity with those who suffer from it, a solidarity cultivated through an awareness of the contingent, vulnerable material details out of which our lives are woven. Adorno’s philosophy struggles with how this awareness can inform social criticism and practice. His success in this endeavor is far from obvious, and his critics have rightly raised some incisive questions regarding the relationship between rationality (the history of which is captured under Adorno’s notion of identity thinking) and the sensitivity for what rationality has excluded (the non-identical). How can this be more than a resigned aesthetic sensibility that laments the products of a historical process that it is powerless to alter? What is left for the social theorist other than assembling the narratives of the marginalized and hoping for a transformation of moral sensibility? It is precisely this question that has proved to be the Achilles’s heel of Adorno’s thought. Having discarded the metaphysical guarantee of historical progress, how can we bridge the gap between our visceral sense that something is wrong with our present social condition and a future in which the wrongness of the present is overcome? How can this visceral feeling take the form of a judgment? The attempt to ground a criticism of 75

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the present in a future that is severed from the immanent development of history, a future that can only arrive as a rupture in history, has invited the criticism that Adorno is a resigned apocalyptic. This chapter considers two different ways in which this criticism of Adorno has been formulated. One criticism comes from Jürgen Habermas, who faults Adorno for his too-hasty dismissal of the different modes of rationality to emerge from the Enlightenment and missing the crucial difference between instrumental and communicative rationality. The other formulation of this criticism comes from Slavoj Žižek who offers a sustained, although indirect, criticism of Adorno for his “totalizing” account of history as the unfolding of instrumental reason (which Žižek compares with Heidegger’s account of technology)—a miserable destiny that we are powerless to alter. Both Žižek and Habermas pay little attention to the relationship between Adorno’s seemingly apocalyptic or eschatological moments and his emerging theory of moral and political judgment. By exploring the relationship between Adorno’s eschatology and his theory of political judgment, we can see the outlines of a political posture somewhere between Habermas’s deliberative democratic theory and Žižek’s flirtations with political violence. HABERMAS’S CRITICISM OF ADORNO According to a now generally accepted position (the dissemination of which is due largely to the work of Habermas), Adorno’s account of the distortions of the rational subject is total and leaves us with no resources for objective or critical social theory. Adorno’s dark view of the subject and the distortions that lie within reason itself cannot generate a theory of society that provides any guidance for social transformation. We are left with a hopelessly distorted subject and society on the one hand, and a utopian ideal of reconciliation that gestures indeterminately toward a beyond. 1 The utopian ideal of reconciliation is hopelessly severed from distorted subjectivity and hence, incapable of providing guidance; it can only provide us with a “mindfulness” that we are in a social situation in which all cows are black, all social life and action equally distorted, every thought and action of the subject equally inscribed by domination. Put differently, the present and the not-yet, the distorted subject and the ideal of reconciliation, are not mediated, and so reconciliation, as Adorno has conceived of it, can provide no guidance for social theory. 2 In order to respond to Habermas’s criticism of Adorno, we must be able to demonstrate the mediation of the present and the not-yet in Adorno’s thought, and the way in which this mediation can guide social criticism. Habermas is aware of Adorno’s use of theological themes in attempting to formulate this interrelationship, and he is aware of the theological themes at work in other Marxists of Adorno’s generation (such as Ernst Bloch

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and Walter Benjamin). 3 But, for Habermas, the theological residue in Adorno’s thought is the symptom of its failure; it is the mark of a bankrupt subjectivity caught in the trap of being unable to find a rational criterion for criticism and then finding itself forced to generate an irrational motive for critique. It is only in the subject’s irrational desperation that theological themes reemerge. The conception of the mediation of the present and the not-yet is not unique to Adorno’s thought. A survey of the Marxist tradition and its provenance in the ancient Hebrew conception of history as progressive, reveals Adorno as one of many who understand history as driven by the tension between the present and the “not-yet.” Reading Adorno within the scope of this Jewish messianic tradition illuminates the critical potential of his thought, because Judaism has always been concerned with the mediation of redemptive hopes through time, within time, within history, and within practice. Messianic Judaism (whether in its restorative or apocalyptic versions) is not severed from the world and its concerns. 4 While Adorno discards the metaphysical and practical religious dimensions of Judiasm, he develops the eschatological strain in Judiasm in his own way. For Adorno, the future is not on a different metaphysical plane, nor is it the province of some supernatural deity. For Adorno, the relation between the present and the not-yet are both on the same ontological, temporal plane: that of material life. The reconciliation of the present and the “not-yet” is not the result of the interruption from something metaphysically different in kind; the intimations of the “notyet” are entirely within matter itself. In this sense, the “theological residue” that Habermas criticizes in Adorno is remarkably anti-theological and atheistic. In Adorno’s view, eschatology is matter’s own reaching beyond itself. It is not reaching beyond itself toward a different ontological plane of pristine Ideas; it is reaching beyond itself temporally, toward a different future, a different society or network of relations, and not a different substance. The core of Habermas’s criticism of Adorno is in the first volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, but variations of his criticism are to be found in Philosophical-Political Profiles, and in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Close readers of Adorno have long questioned the soundness of Habermas’s criticisms; and developments in global politics since 9/11 have renewed interest in Adorno’s emphasis on how ideology can take hold of the conceptual processing and emotional life of the subject. 5 The response to Habermas’s criticism of Adorno determines whether or not to take the turn toward communicative action prescribed by Habermas, and, hence, to cede to Habermas the legacy of critical theory. Habermas divides his criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer into five parts: (A) their transformation of Weber’s rationalization thesis into a thesis about world history; (B) as a result of the generalization of the reification thesis, Adorno embraces an anthropology of reification that

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implicates all subject-object and subject-subject relations in the distortions of reification; (C) this forces Adorno to place all forms of the mastery of nature under the category of domination; (D) this move leaves Adorno’s thought mired in traditional contemplation, unable to offer any guidance for practice; (E) and, therefore, Adorno’s thought remains well within the limits of the subjectivity it tried to escape. 6 Habermas fails to take into account three key features of Adorno’s thought. The first is the role of historical and social mediation in instrumental reason; the second is the mediation of mimesis and instrumental reason; the third feature is not so much missed as it is neglected, namely, the relation of Adorno’s thought to the Judeo-Christian eschatological tradition. This third feature of Adorno’s thought induces Habermas not to look further in Adorno’s criticism of instrumental reason, and to discredit it as a reversion to an irrational and outmoded philosophy of history. The principal focus of Habermas’s criticism of the tradition of critical theory that preceded him is centered on the theses of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this text, Habermas finds a movement away from the attempt to rehabilitate a Marxian critique of capitalism and toward an abstract philosophy of history. 7 TOTALIZATION OF CRITIQUE? We will now look at one of the specific features of Habermas’s claim that Adorno has totalized critique (theses A, B, and C) and some of the limitations Habermas sees in this approach. Habermas claims that Adorno has “totalized critique” by attempting to turn the resources of reason against reason itself. Adorno, along with the other predecessors of Habermas, were in the position of having to provide “a conceptual apparatus that will allow them nothing less than to denounce the whole as the untrue.” 8 This need arises from Adorno’s analysis of society as thoroughly distorted by instrumental rationality or “reification.” 9 Adorno’s attempt to discover a standpoint from which to critique the whole as untrue turns to a history of the subject to account for the genesis and dominance of instrumental rationality. In this way, Adorno generalizes the category of reification. Whereas Lukàcs’s formulation of the theory of reification was specific to bourgeois society, Adorno “regarded these structures of consciousness . . . as fundamental.” 10 For Adorno, reification is not derived from the dominance of the commodity form in bourgeois society, it has a deeper historical provenance and is not limited to modern science, but has its origins in First Philosophy. 11 Habermas views this as a turn toward a dark idealism, which views the cunning of reason and its itinerary as a history of domination. And this move is the undoing of critical theory’s proximity to concrete social relations:

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Horkheimer and Adorno give such an abstract interpretation of the structures of reified consciousness that it covers not only the theoretical form of identifying thought but even the confrontation of goal-oriented acting subjects with external nature. 12

Approaching social criticism through a philosophy of the history of the subject, Adorno finds the roots of reified consciousness embedded “in the form of existence of a species that has to reproduce itself through labor,” that is, through the objectification of nature. 13 Hence, Habermas can conclude, “The interpersonal relation between subject and subject, which is decisive for the model of exchange, has no constitutive significance for instrumental reason.” 14 Despite the weaknesses of Habermas’s reading of Adorno, we might still address the question of whether or not the primal history of the subject necessarily leaves us with an abstract account of the limits of reason that discards the specificity of social and historical context. The philosophy of history to which Horkheimer and Adorno “revert” endeavors to recover the history of the subject that has been lost, and that is not recoverable on the basis of an idealist philosophy of history. They endeavor to forge an approach that allows us to think the subject in its materiality, in the close proximity of reason and its material, objective, social, political, bodily conditions. It attempts roughly to chart the course of what has been stripped away from the subject in its historical development. GROUNDWORK FOR A POLITICAL ETHIC In Adorno’s texts, there are numerous detailed treatments of the subject within bourgeois society; and Adorno is able to analyze bourgeois subjectivity as reification or instrumental reason par excellence. He certainly does not suggest that instrumental reason has always and in every historical age flourished in its current form, and has always been the dominant social/cultural influence. 15 The critique of instrumental reason arises out of an immanent criticism of the intricacies of bourgeois society. Adorno offers us a philosophy of history capable of seeing the provenance of instrumental reason, capable of seeing its historical development as not entirely limited to the modern age, and not as liberated from pre-modern thought as it understands itself to be. We are meant to take from Habermas’s criticism that Adorno has left the realm of social thought for the rarefied heights of grand theory and has sacrificed concretion in the process. We need only look at Adorno’s extensive studies in the social dynamics of propaganda and the phenomena of the culture industry to place Habermas’s claim in question. 16 A second general thesis in Habermas’s criticism holds that Adorno equates reason and domination, and, therefore, is unable to provide a

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rational criterion as the basis of critical rationality. What is missed in this criticism of Adorno can be gleaned from Habermas’s use of language throughout all of his criticisms of Adorno. Habermas repeatedly conflates “instrumental reason” and “reason” throughout, and conveys the impression that Adorno believed that all of reason’s potentials terminated in instrumental reason. This conflation prevents us from considering what was central to Adorno’s philosophy—the redemption of reason, the generation of potentials for rationality that are missed by instrumental reason and its cultural dominance. 17 Because of this conflation of reason and instrumental reason, Habermas presents Adorno’s notion of mimesis as “the other of reason.” But for Adorno mimesis is not external to the operations of instrumental reason. 18 Instrumental reason itself is a distorted form of mimesis, and according to Adorno, instrumental reason can be properly understood only in this way. 19 DETERMINATE NEGATION Instrumental reason is not the other of mimesis, instrumental reason is mediated by mimesis. It is not Adorno’s contention that instrumental reason should be abolished; on the contrary, instrumental reason plays an important role in human emancipation. The problem with instrumental reason is that it has become total; it has been so powerfully effective in the shaping of humanity and in giving us a measure of stability in relation to the environment that it has laid claim to the sole title of reason. But it is precisely this totalizing claim—the equation of reason and instrumental reason—that must be dispelled. It is the equation of reason and instrumentality that must be contested if domination is to be resisted by something qualitatively different, and not merely displaced by another form of domination hostile to, and abstractly negating, the gains of modern civilization. Above all, what must be kept in mind is that Adorno’s negation of instrumental rationality is a determinate negation: it brings with it that which has been negated. 20 The point is not to do away with instrumental reason, but to contest its claim to be final. In order for a determinate negation of instrumental reason to be possible, instrumental reason must carry within it the seeds of its own overcoming—it exists under the pressure of what it keeps from thought and from social awareness. This negation cannot take place absent a dialectical relationship between instrumental reason and mimesis. Mimesis, therefore, cannot be the abstract other of reason or of instrumental reason. This brings us to our response to Habermas’s third general claim: that Adorno is unable to establish a rational criterion for criticism and so must lapse into some form of irrationality—in this case the eschatological hope for universal reconciliation. Habermas’s inability to understand the me-

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diations in Adorno’s thought is repeated here. It is, according to Habermas, not possible to mediate the present society and the utopian idea of universal reconciliation. Consequently, Adorno has brought critical theory to a dead end in which concrete social criticism is discarded in favor of a utopian longing that is incapable of providing any guidance for social critique and practice. Habermas notes the similarity between Adorno’s position on reconciliation and the Judeo-Christian tradition. He also notes the influence of this tradition on the works of Marx and other contemporary Marxists such as Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin. 21 But Habermas feels that this influence leads to a dead end, incapable of wedding its ideal to practice, which amounts to claiming the impossibility of mediating the reconciliation with nature (materiality) and the present un-reconciled state of society. In turning to this theological theme, Adorno is joining in the failure of Marx and of the Judeo-Christian tradition to ground reason in a philosophy of history and all of the theological and metaphysical baggage that this move entails. BENJAMIN’S MESSIANIC MATERIALISM Habermas’s claim reveals his lack of familiarity with the structure of eschatology and the range of problems that the tradition of eschatology has addressed. As Habermas has acknowledged, the general JudeoChristian eschatological current is not absent from the tradition of critical thought and political radicalism. He finds this current at work in Marx, Benjamin, and Bloch as well as Adorno. 22 It is well known that Adorno was profoundly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin, but he was also intimately familiar with Bloch’s work and had engaged in dialogue with Bloch about the meaning of utopian hope. 23 It is principally these resources that Adorno draws upon in his formulation of the normative basis of critical theory, and in his attempts to ground criticism in the suffering and hopes of the empirical subject. We thus come up against a problem of how messianic hope (in the form of utopia) can inform political judgment. How can we conceive of the relationship between eschatology and political action without repeating the pre-modern tendency to locate the good in an impossible beyond? This perennial tension within Western culture has been framed in various ways, as the tension between science and religion, reason and faith, state and ecclesiastic power, and so on. The disenchantment of the world effected by modernity decidedly rejected the claims of poetry, revelation and tradition as repositories of truth. The question reemerged vigorously in twentieth century philosophy and was addressed within the context of Marxist thought by Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Adorno, among others.

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Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known for his unique marriage of Marxism and Jewish eschatology. Adorno owes much of his philosophical inspiration to his interaction with Benjamin, whose philosophy of history seems to have strongly influenced the spirit of Dialectic of Enlightenment. 24 In his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin averred that dialectical materialism is secretly propped up by theology, “which is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” 25 Theology stands in the place of disfigured humanity, and it speaks on behalf of what the course of history has crushed in its wake. Benjamin’s “Theses” offer a criticism of the idealist view of history as continuous progress, as a homogenous continuum in which the present can look toward the future “free from envy”—because there is no future that will transform human relations as they are. 26 Idealism closes off the impetus for such a transformation, as it views the present as the fulfillment of the past. Contrary to idealism, dialectical materialism can detect the fissures and scars created by the course of history; it inspires the remembrance of history as unredeemed. Genuine human happiness, according to Benjamin, is approached through remembrance, through the hope for a redeemed past—this is as true of personal history as it is of the history of humanity: The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. 27

The present is a tissue of the actions and hopes of the dead. The future that would be enviable is that future in which the dead are brought back to life and their lives are made whole and given back all the possibilities for happiness that history denied them. In dialectical materialist history, the barrier between the living and the dead is permeated by hope and remembrance. The hopes of the dead impress upon the present and the hope of the present for a future in which the past damage done to human lives is undone. The present is thus the bearer of messianic hope: There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that. 28

Historical materialism offers access to the unsettled account of history— to the need for redemption—and has always resisted the attempt to interpret history through abstractions. This is true of Marx no less than Benjamin. At the opening of Marx’s Grundrisse we find the claim that real history is generated by the labor and activity of particular individuals,

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not of abstract entities (states, nations), which are products of the collective life of individuals. 29 According to Benjamin, only emphasis upon the particular, the emphasis given by historical materialism, can chronicle the unredeemed past: [N]othing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’orde du jour—and that day is Judgment day. 30

Dialectical materialism has the potential to wrest history from the victors, to protect tradition against a conformity that forgets the claim of the past upon the present and the future. 31 This is the “weak Messianic power” tapped through remembrance. Benjamin’s work employs eschatology to keep history from becoming the property of the victor. While there were substantial disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno on the potential of the masses to become the political agent of this “weak Messianic power,” and to effect the revolutionary break with bourgeois society, their agreement on the critical potential of eschatology is significant. 32 In so far as both Benjamin and Adorno understood aesthetics as a repository of eschatological hope—of hope for a break with the course of history, their debate over aesthetics and politics could be recast as a debate over the relationship between eschatology and politics. Adorno keeps aesthetics and politics in tension. Whereas according to Benjamin the revolution of the proletariat is aided by the politicization of aesthetics. 33 But would this also not amount to the politicization of eschatology. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” attests to the convergence of aesthetics, of the repository of the deepest human longings, and political action. Adorno accepts Benjamin’s philosophy of history, and, even to a great extent, accepts Benjamin’s materialist view of history. But he is centrally concerned with resisting the termination of critical thought, aesthetics, and norms in political action. In this regard, Adorno’s insistence on keeping eschatological longing and political action in tension is consonant with more traditional formulations of eschatology. Like traditional formulations of eschatology, Adorno’s thought does not terminate in a theory of revolution, nor, contrary to the Habermasian reading, does it culminate in a dark resignation before unalterable social, historical forces. Before exploring the particular features of Adorno’s eschatology, we need to look into whether or not eschatology as such leaves us in the position of resignation or an irrational politics. Žižek offers us a very different criticism of Adorno’s alleged political resignation drawing from, rather than dismissing, the political eschatology of Benjamin.

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DIVINE VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT In Less than Nothing, Žižek addresses the difficulty in any attempt to represent or tell the story of Holocaust survivors. His account of why this is impossible offers the reader a glimpse into a few of Žižek’s core anthropological assumptions. To summarize Žižek’s thesis, the impossibility of representing the Holocaust is not due to the insufficiency of language or of the symbolic network of reference and meaning operative in the culture. Instead, following a thesis Žižek develops throughout the book, the impossibility of representing the Holocaust is inscribed within the Holocaust itself: 34 In a Hegelian way, the problem is here part of the solution: the very deficiencies of the traumatized subject’s report on the facts bear witness to the truthfulness of his report, since they signal that the reported content has contaminated the very form in which it is reported. 35

While this prevents us from offering “an account” of the victims’ experience, the trauma can still be shown in the very distortions of language that emerge in the attempt to speak about it. 36 Žižek sees Jorge Semprún’s novel, The Long Voyage, as the paradigm for allowing the trauma of the event to disrupt the aesthetic form of its representation. In the “fragmentation of the narrative lines” through which Semprún’s protagonist, Gerard, relates the story of his capture by the Nazis and subsequent “voyage” by train to Buchenwald, we see how such a terrible event affects the very identity of the subject: its elementary contours of reality are shattered, the subject no longer experiences himself as part of a continuous flow of history which devolves from the past towards the future. 37

The trauma of the objective, factual events is read in the disruption of the subject’s frame. But we cannot unravel this dyad and parse the subjective elements from the objective occurrences. There is no screen between the subject and object that we could remove and see the object for what it is. The trauma that shatters the subject in face of the object is internal to the object. In this case, the object is a traumatic opacity uniting subject and object. This repeats Žižek’s appropriation of Hegel’s insistence that there is no essence beyond appearances, an objectivity beyond all subjective processing. Instead, on Hegel’s view, the appearances are the essence. To put this in Žižek’s formulation, “the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself.” 38 There is no neutral assemblage of facts by themselves that could be reported and understood if only the veil of subjective trauma could be pulled back. The difference between the ineffable horror of the Holocaust (essence) and the tortured subjective attempts to tell the story (appearance) are inscribed within the story itself.

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But the Holocaust narrative seems to defy our ability to tell a story at all; it is a story whose audience does not yet exist, an event that shatters the conditions of appearance and challenges the basic coordinates of reality—of what is possible, and of what it is possible to speak about and to understand. The broad cultural sense of audience is missing: “there is no proper public, no listener adequate to receive the witnessing.” 39 The absence of an audience, of anyone capable of listening, Žižek notes, haunted Primo Levi more than the thought of his own death at Auschwitz and drove many survivors of Bosnian rape camps to suicide: The most traumatic dream Primo Levi had in Auschwitz was about his survival: the war is over, he is reunited with his family, telling them about his life in the camp, but they gradually become bored, start to yawn and, one after another, leave the table, so that finally Levi is left alone. An anecdote from the Bosnian war in the early 1990s makes the same point: many of the girls who survived brutal rapes later killed themselves, having rejoined their community only to find that no one was really ready to listen to them, or to accept their testimony. 40

Using Lacan’s terminology, Žižek concludes, “what is missing here is not only another human being, the attentive listener, but the ‘big Other’ itself, the space of the symbolic inscription or registration of by words.” 41 But Žižek doesn’t think this leaves us at a dead end, “irrevocably trapped in the misery of our finitude, deprived of any redemptive moments.” 42 Even in the midst of the darkest moment in Semprún’s novel— a scene in which two small children emerge as the only survivors in a freight car that has arrived at Auschwitz in the middle of winter—there is a moment that pierces through and gestures beyond the fractured narrative. As the guards set their dogs loose on the fleeing children, the following scene unfolds: The little one began to fall behind, the SS were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too, the smell of blood was driving them mad, and then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller . . . together they covered a few more yards . . . till the blows of the clubs felled them and, together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity. 43

This moment, according to Žižek, breaks through the otherwise irremediably bleak and fragmented narrative of Semprún’s novel. But it does not gesture toward a beyond, to a world of humanity beyond the hell created by the Nazis: “It is the pure surface of such fixed images of eternity, not any deeper Meaning, which allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Shoah.” 44 The “pure surface,” the appearance of this act of solidarity in all its fragility and finality is the redemptive moment. The moment of resistance within the fragmentary narrative that shows the impotence of the “big Other” is an accusation cast at the big Other, like

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Antigone’s resistance to Creon’s orders not to bury her brother. It is an image of the Lacanian ethical act that rejects the existing order of reference, meaning and value absolutely. This appearance of something that resists the world around it without reference to some invulnerable beyond, and with the fullest embrace of its own contingency, is the “pure surface” which is “eternal” only in the specific sense that it resists the dominant current of the time (or historical horizon) in which it finds itself. At first blush, Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Hegel seems to intersect with Adorno’s negative dialectics. The dominant course of history, the narrative of progress, cannot provide us with a language in which our suffering can be understood. Understanding the objective, material, embodied dimension of history requires that we attend to what identity thinking (or instrumental reason) has done to the lives and bodies of those whom it deems expendable. In a formulation strikingly familiar to that of Žižek, Adorno writes, “No recollection of transcendence is possible anymore, save by way of perdition; eternity appears, not as such, but diffracted through the most perishable.” 45 While they share this basic insight, they diverge dramatically regarding the political implications of this fragile redemptive power. Žižek sees this “appearance of eternity” as the death knell of the dominant culture and as a political call to action, to bring the big Other, along with the institutions, practices and meanings that it undergirds (i.e., capitalism and liberal democracy), crashing down. In the almost lifeless bodies of those in the camps, Adorno sees the torsion between instrumental reason (identity thinking) and the human vulnerability that identity thinking excludes from its concept of the human. This act of exclusion or failure to integrate our materiality in all of its complexity is at the heart of our uniquely modern forms of barbarity. Žižek acknowledges this in his reading of Adorno, but he seems to miss the ethical implication of Adorno’s position. In The Parallax View, he criticizes Adorno along with Levinas for their “failure to include in the scope of ‘human’ . . . the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-toface relationship between humans.” 46 What Adorno fails to understand or adequately explore, according to Žižek, is “the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the ‘living dead’ in the concentration camps.” 47 In short, what Adorno and Levinas fail to understand is the inhuman and monstrous dimension of the face of the Other: When we are confronted with a Muselmann, we precisely cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his or her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility—what we get is a kind of blank wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor with whom no empathic relationship is possible. 48

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If we take a step back and place this lens before Semprún’s account of the “hands clasped in eternity” what appears is not merely the frail hands of the children but a vision of the monstrous faces of their killers. 49 The “eternity” that thus appears carries with it a judgment upon the killers and a justification to unleash on them all of the inhumanity that they have perpetrated on others. The irruption of this total judgment upon the “big Other” is what Žižek refers to as “Divine Violence.” It is not simply an act of violence against a few perpetrators, but an act of violence that destroys the basic coordinates of the dominant culture and leaves us without the resources for finding a deeper meaning. The “hands clasped for all eternity” is one figure of divine violence. The hands, for Žižek, are like the story of Job; they resist any attempt to find a deeper meaning behind suffering. Žižek finds “obscene” the attempts of Job’s friends to find some moral or theological judgment, some “reason” behind his suffering, why he was singled out by God: This legacy of Job prevents us from taking refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, the God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the Holocaust or the death of millions in the Congo over these last years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning through which they contribute to the harmony of the whole? Is there a whole which can teleologically justify and thus redeem or sublate an event such as the Holocaust? 50

This figure of the senseless suffering of innocents is only one figure of divine violence—an intrusion into the history of violence without meaning or justification. Another figure emerges when the tables are turned and the victims become the vehicles of a world-cleansing, angelic violence perpetrated against the “big Other” that has failed to hear the cry of the poor and the oppressed. Žižek draws this figure of redemptive violence from the famous passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in which he interprets Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus as the “Angel of History” looking back in horror upon the catastrophic injustices of history piling ever higher. Only through the irruption of the “retaliatory and destructive rage” of the Angel can history be righted and take on another meaning. Peter Sloterdijk has criticized this notion of redemptive, revolutionary violence as having its roots in the same world-weariness and “resentment” that Nietzsche definitively criticized as the nihilistic core of JudeoChristian morality. 51 Žižek finds Sloterdijk drawing from a superficial reading of the implications of Nietzsche and Freud. What is typically, and superficially, taken from Freudian (or Lacanian) psychoanalysis is

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that our moral autonomy is only a veneer behind which some base drive (resentment, sadism, etc.) provides the real motive. Žižek insists that something entirely different is taking place through divine violence. In the act of total resistance or rejection directed toward the oppressive “big Other” there is a moment of genuine moral autonomy. This, in Žižek’s view, reverses our usual Freudian suspicion of Kant: What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some pathological determinations in order to avoid this fact. 52

What Sloterdijk cannot countenance, according to Žižek, is “the MIRACLE of ethical universality that cannot be reduced to a distorted effect of lower libidinal processes.” 53 This faith in ethical universality, the faith in our capacity to reshape the world as a whole, is not a power that comes from outside of history. In this sense, the use of the term “divine violence” is misleading; the significance of divine violence is the opposite of what the term seems to imply. Divine violence is not the judgment of an omnipotent God upon the injustice of history; instead, “divine violence is a sign of God’s (the big Other’s) own impotence.” 54 The faith in ethical universality cannot mean for Žižek what it meant for Kant, for whom autonomy is grounded in the conformity of our will with the moral law. For Žižek, universality is the gateway for a world-shaping, self-affirming act that can only unfold through the universal negation of the world as it is. For Žižek, autonomy is the product of global revolution. Without the insistence on (or faith in) “ethical universality” Žižek reminds us, a revolution “is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime.” 55 But can Žižek’s notion of divine violence, and the refurbished Kantian framework he draws from, help us to navigate through the complexities of the administered world and the culture industry? POLITICAL ESCHATOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL POLITICS This dimension of eschatological thought arises from its understanding of historical mediation: the remembrance of history, motivated by the refusal to allow the suffering of the past to go without consideration, or to be forgotten through an immanent redemption of history. The answer to the problem of suffering in history is given various responses, but the materialist view of history takes shape as a response to the empirical persons who shaped and were shaped by history, and by material social forces. This view of history is in stark opposition to idealist interpretations of history as the unfolding of an absolute consciousness, in the face of which the particular individual is only a medium.

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The question to be addressed to Adorno and to eschatology, then, is whether the hope for the redemption of matter has political significance or dissolves into political irrationalism or resignation. If Adorno’s critical theory has anything to bring to progressive politics then the impossibility of redeeming history from within must not culminate in an apology for the political status quo. The hope for the redemption of matter fashions conscience; it is a reminder that moral norms are intertwined with political action and the cycle of violence in history; nonetheless, moral norms refuse to be reduced to political action and the capitulation to violence. Drawing from Adorno, the political effect of eschatology should not be a political eschatology in which a given political movement or regime could claim to be the vehicle of historical redemption. This is precisely the danger presented by idealist and orthodox Marxist politics. The proper understanding of Adorno’s eschatological dimension allows us to resist the tendency of identity thinking to collapse eschatology into politics. Such a development would amount to the identification of power and redemption, in which the triumph of the victor alone would be the sign of redemption. Eschatology resists the alwayspresent danger for power to take up the space of redemption. It should always stand in a space from which the incompleteness of politics can be illuminated. There is substantial agreement to this extent between Adorno’s political thought and Gershom Scholem’s interpretation of apocalyptic Judaism: only a self-redeeming subject can render politics eschatological. The Marxist endeavor to formulate such a revolutionary subject is scuttled by its own materialist understanding of history. A historical consciousness that effaces our vulnerability and contingency generates the volatile political tensions that ignite genocide. This is the core of Adorno’s diagnosis of modernity’s genocidal tendencies. Maintaining critical distance between eschatological hope and political reality is the basis of moral politics, or of a political ethics. Within this space between the not-yet and the present we can see the danger of political ideologies that attempt to collapse eschatological hope into the present. Yet sound political judgment can be cultivated only within this space. The space thus created by maintaining the tension between eschatology and politics refuses to permit the silencing of suffering in history and society. This refusal is the foundation of a genuinely human solidarity: a solidarity not understood as an abstract universal consensus, but as the very condition of collective life. What binds us is not simply the collective self-sacrifice that secures the existence of the group; instead, the bonds of human solidarity are forged by the capacity to give a voice to our suffering and to have it understood. 56 The moral sensibility that grounds compassion is among the most essential and the most difficult to cultivate. It is the cultivation of this sense that Adorno found evaporating in modern society and politics. The new space in which this was being cultivated was in aesthetics. We

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should, however, understand Adorno’s work in aesthetics as an endeavor to bring out this sense, and all of its interrelations with politics and society. This approach is hardly leading us down the road of political irrationalism. In fact, in Adorno’s view, this is the hidden potential and promise of the Enlightenment. Here lies one among many of the significant differences between Adorno, the professed atheist, and traditional eschatology. The tradition can avail itself of an eschaton, the Messiah. Adorno can hold out only the possibilities that can be seen through the fissures within the fabric of the modern subject; he cannot give us the added assurance of faith that the Messiah must come. 57 Nonetheless, critical thought motivated by the hope for redemption leads us to places where modern subjectivity cannot take us, and yet these places hold the real promise of the Enlightenment, humans living together with all of their complexity and difference, and without fear. NOTES 1. Albrecht Wellmer, “Truth, Semblance, and Reconciliation,” in The Persistence of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 12. For a concise treatment of Wellmer’s criticisms of Adorno, see Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 276–289. 2. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 116–117. 3. Habermas is aware of the legacy of secularized theology in Marxist social thought and he is convinced that this legacy is a dead end, precisely because of the excessively high hopes it held for critical reason. Habermas avers that Adorno’s notion of the redemption of matter “would entail the demand that nature open up its eyes, that in the condition of reconciliation we talk with animals, plants, and rocks. Marx also fastened on to this idea in the name of a humanization of nature. Like him, Adorno, (and also Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Bloch) entertained doubts that the emancipation of humanity is possible without the resurrection of nature.” Jürgen Habermas, “The Primal History of Subjectivity: Self-Affirmation Gone Wild,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 107. 4. Gershom Scholem takes this to be a basic tenet of Jewish messianic thought. Jewish eschatology hopes for the redemption of the material world, and refuses to leave this dimension of humanity behind: “Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community.” Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 1–2. 5. Robert Hullot-Kentnor’s work has placed in question Habermas’s characterization of Adorno as a pessimist, and the analysis of Adorno’s work as a Nietzschean attack on reason. Hullot-Kentnor brings out many of the details discussed in the earlier chapters of this dissertation: that Adorno’s work is fundamentally an attempt to redeem reason, not to discard it. See Robert Hullot-Kentnor, “Back to Adorno,” Telos 81 (Fall 1989), pp. 5–29. 6. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 366. 7. This criticism appears in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 107–114, and in The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, pp. 377–378. 8. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.1, p. 378.

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9. Habermas is comfortable describing Adorno’s project as a critique of reification; however, Adorno was wary of the limitations of such an approach: “[R]eification itself is the reflexive form of false objectivity; centering theory around reification, a form of consciousness, makes critical theory idealistically acceptable to the reigning consciousness and to the collective unconscious” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1973], p. 190). 10. Ibid., p. 378. 11. Ibid. 12. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, p. 378. 13. Ibid., p. 379. 14. Habermas also compares his claim here to the work of J.F. Schmucker, AdornoLogik des Zerfalls (Stuttgart, 1977): “Whereas for a member of modern exchange society the dialectic of self-preservation is constituted through the exchange process, for the structure of Odyssean subjectivity it is rather derived from the principle of mastering nature.” This is cited by Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 453. As my forthcoming criticism will indicate, both Habermas and Schmucker fail to understand the way in which the mastery of nature is at work both within the primal history of subjectivity and within its present manifestation in capitalist society. It seems that Habermas and Schmucker are too attached to the ideals of the enlightenment to see the way in which one of its central themes—reason as the mastery of nature—is an obstacle to the emancipatory hopes of the enlightenment. 15. Adorno’s discussion of mimesis and the emergence of subjectivity is clear on this point—that subjectivity has not existed the same in all ages, nor has instrumental reason. See the discussion in chapter 1 of this study. See also “The Concept of Enlightenment” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 3–42. 16. See chapter 6. 17. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: MacMillan, 1978), pp. 44–45. 18. The opposition between instrumental reason (identity thinking) and mimesis is dialectical, neither one can be completely isolated from the other. The features of mimetic comportment can be read through what instrumental reason excludes from our view. In Adorno’s words “concepts include the unincluded” (Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. Willis Domingo [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982], p. 39). 19. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 180–181. 20. Adorno’s thought should not be mistaken for an attempt to discard conceptual thought: “[W]hatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 9–10). 21. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, p. 383. 22. For a fairly good general account of the influence of Judaism on critical theory see George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 92–102. Several other more specific studies are cited below. Shlomo Avineri’s classic work on Marx, The Social and Political Philosophy of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 250–256, also addresses the eschatological themes in Marx. 23. See, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 1–17. 24. See Andrew Arato’s remarks on Benjamin in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 215. 25. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 253. 26. Ibid., 254. 27. Ibid.

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28. Ibid. 29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 84. 30. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, p. 256. 31. Ibid., p. 255. 32. Adorno understood the purposeless objectification of art to be a refuge for mimesis—objectification free from the compulsion of instrumental reason. To subordinate artworks to political action (in the manner of Socialist realism) would destroy the purposelessness that permits art to resist instrumental reason. According to Adorno, artworks offer us only an image of reconciliation, not a blueprint for revolutionary action. See, Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukàcs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 149–280. 33. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, p. 242. 34. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 24. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 26. 37. Ibid., p. 26. 38. Ibid., p. 37. 39. Ibid., p. 29. 40. Ibid., p. 29. 41. Ibid., p. 29. 42. Ibid., p. 30. 43. Semprún, The Long Voyage, p. 172. Cited in Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 30 44. Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 30. 45. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 306. 46. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 111. 47. Ibid., p. 113. 48. Ibid., p. 113. 49. Recall the earlier discussion (in chapter 1) of Emil Fackenheim’s remark that his only refutation of the conceptual and rational elegance of Hegel’s system was his memory of the faces of the guards at Sachsenhausen. It is worth considering that this memory that served Fackenheim as a refutation of Hegel serves for Žižek as a confirmation of Hegel’s thought. 50. Slavoj Žižek, Violence, (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 180–181. 51. Ibid., p. 194. 52. Ibid., p. 196. 53. Ibid., p. 194. 54. Ibid., p. 201. 55. Ibid., p. 203. 56. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 26. 57. Ibid., p. 247.

SIX Violence and Utopia

ENLISTING THEOLOGY In The Persistence of Modernity, Albrecht Wellmer describes Adorno’s philosophy as a response to Benjamin’s suggestion that historical materialism needs “to enlist the services of theology.” 1 Žižek and Adorno each lay claim to Benjamin’s suggestion, and as we have seen, they carry this in very different directions. Both of them attempt to develop a critical perspective from which to judge the course of history and to intervene in history on behalf of the “lost causes” and shattered lives on the margins of history. Two very different versions of political judgment emerge from their interpretations of Benjamin’s call to enlist the services of theology for the cause of human emancipation. We have already seen the direction in which Žižek takes Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence.” Adorno is notorious for confining emancipatory hope to aesthetics; a move for which he has been widely criticized as a political defeatist. Žižek follows the critics of Adorno who claim that his critique of identity thinking has sapped the practical, political emphasis of Marxist theory. A closer look at the political dimension of Adorno’s aesthetics reveals an attempt to conceptualize a sensuously informed standard of judgment that remains attentive to the details of material life. Adorno’s reconfiguration of philosophy as a response to the separation of sensation and thought, of matter and concept, effects a reorientation of philosophy toward the lives of empirical subjects and their interaction. This separation of matter and concept is only possible in thought or in theory. Concepts arise from social relations and retain the mark of the institutions in which they are produced. The norms that govern who may speak with authority and the socio-economic position from which they speak lay claim to legitimacy beyond their contingent and fragile 93

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origins. The attempt to ground social norms in eternity and to render the extant set of social relations and values final is the political effect of identity thinking. Adorno’s aim is to overcome the dominance of the identity principle from within—to overcome the coercive nature of concepts by means of concepts. 2 This calls for thought to operate dialectically without coming to rest in a higher synthesis, always recognizing the social and political context from which concepts emerge. 3 Exploring the social, historical context of the concept demystifies it and allows us to see it as microcosm of the society that produced it. We find that we are still in the context that generated the concept; it does not terminate in the fixity of identity, but in the complexity and incompleteness of the context from which it is thought. Adorno’s retort to Hegel is that dialectics terminates in nonidentity—the recognition that concept and object are not identical, that the concept woven out of human interaction is never complete, because the content of life always overflows our attempts to conceptualize it. What motivates negative dialectic is not the motion of Spirit, or merely the movement of thought or pure subjectivity. Negative dialectic is motivated by material suffering, material longing. 4 And it continues to operate as the engine of thought so long as the needs of the empirical self remain unsatisfied. 5 So long as rationality severs itself from bodily feeling and impulse, elaborate and unnecessary repression will become associated with rationality. What keeps negative dialectic unsettled, and preserves its critical orientation in the face of the ideological saturation of society, is the yearning for the reconciliation of concept and object, the spirit and the flesh, humankind and nature—the reconciliation of all the central oppositions that structure Western thought and culture. 6 Visceral longing for a truly human future is the fundamental motivation for Adorno’s negative dialectic. This longing is at once aesthetic (a feeling or sense for what is missing) and eschatological (a hope directed beyond the immanent course of history). Adorno’s appropriation of eschatology rejects the secularized eschatology of German idealism, which recasts eschatology as the progress of reason in history. Adorno’s eschatology is both anti-Hegelian and antiChristian in its insistence that we cannot be reconciled or redeemed in an unredeemed world. Adorno’s resistance to the notion that the Absolute is wholly immanent to history is, as we have seen from the discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment, central to his philosophical orientation. Especially after the horror of the Holocaust, it has become impossible to claim a progressive current to history as a whole. Our yearning for universal harmony is not satisfied within the course of history; only an abstract and thoroughly disembodied view of history could claim otherwise. History needs to be rethought now in the manifest absence of the Absolute, from the perspective of the embodied particular persons who suffer and die in the course of events.

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RECOVERY OF EXPERIENCE AS A POLITICAL ETHIC The suffering of the particular, of those whose names will never enter the annals of history, is what calls for thought. Since “the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth” we must attempt to think the universal through the suffering of the particular, and this suffering was never greater than during the events surrounding the Holocaust. 7 The final section of Negative Dialectics is a sustained meditation on the rethinking of metaphysics after the Holocaust. What is the meaning of metaphysics in light of historical events that ran roughshod over the enduring truths of Western culture? Adorno engages in a post-Holocaust recovery of metaphysics, and asks the question of how metaphysics is possible after Auschwitz, and what thought must engage in order to be in contact with “what there is.” Adorno is concerned with how there can be metaphysics without forgetting or eclipsing the particular conditioned human situation out of which the thought about the real arises. The task is to overcome the distortions that self-preservation and the identity principle generate: in short, the urge for security—in the exaggerated form that it takes on in instrumental rationality and identity thinking—induces us to think in stereotypes that block our contact with the real, with what is actually at work in the situation of the thinker, and what is actually longed for. Negative dialectic is, among other things, Adorno’s attempt to recast Marx’s ideology criticism at a time in which the rational content of extant social conditions can no longer be used as an index of truth. 8 It is important to note that Adorno does not completely discard the ideals of bourgeois society—freedom, equality, and individuality. In many ways he seems to be simply repeating the Marxist criticism of liberalism: liberalism has the right ideals but creates social conditions that make the realization of its own ideals impossible. 9 For Marxism, it was sufficient to point out this contradiction and announce the need for the creation of different social conditions adequate to actualize the ideals of liberalism. Dialectic of Enlightenment was largely a diagnosis of the deeper flaw in the ideals of bourgeois society, leading to the conclusion that the ideals themselves carried with them the ages old tension between the ideal and the sensual fulfillment that the ideal promises. Reason’s history is shot through with domination: we think in order to control and predict, to defend ourselves from the unforeseeable. Reason will never be completely absent of coercion or control; we cannot think without limits, definitions, and concepts. But reason’s tendency toward domination will never be checked unless we dispel the illusion that what is true must also be invulnerable, impregnable, and immune to the ravages of time and the force of events. It is with this point that Adorno opens his “Meditations on Metaphysics.” “We cannot say any more that the immutable is truth, and that the

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mobile, transitory is appearance.” 10 The classical attempt of metaphysics to understand the relationship between the infinite and the finite, the one and the many, placed its emphasis on transcending the many, on leaving the plurality of experience behind in order to arrive at what is “really real,” the unifying principle that is not bound by time and materiality. This synoptic view of metaphysics has its own limitations, not the least of which being that it leaves behind the variety of different approaches to metaphysics. What must be kept in mind is that Adorno is centrally concerned with the coercive element of thought. In this light, we can understand Adorno’s view of the history of metaphysics as accurate insofar as the coercive element is present within it, in the division of materiality and truth. It is this division that allows the claims to truth, reality, justice, morality and rationality—the claims that orient thought and action—to be made without consideration for the human needs and longings that these claims impact upon. The separation of thought and affect was never more present than in the human extermination industry of Nazi Germany. It is this historical event that announced the need to rethink metaphysics radically, to rethink the relationship between thought and the real. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, it would be the height of intellectual irresponsibility to remain wedded to the metaphysics of immanence, to see the truth as something unfolding progressively in history. Hence, Adorno writes, After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence. 11

The notion that we might hold out an ideal toward which all endeavors and events in history will converge by their own progress is crafted out of concepts that silence the suffering of history, concepts that do not acknowledge or allow themselves to be compromised by an exterior; in short, they are concepts that adhere unrelentingly to the identity principle. It is the tendency of thought to proceed in a way that renders suffering in history insignificant in the face of our ability to generate sense that creates the real political danger of identity thinking; for we can thus “polish off” those who suffer from the course of progress as deviations from the concept. 12 Put in Adorno’s words, “Genocide is the absolute integration,” the refusal to acknowledge the right to exist of that which falls outside the limits of the concept. 13 We cannot, then, avail ourselves of any metaphysics that is not immersed in the world as it is experienced by the particular. Any other approach to recovering metaphysics, any approach that leaves the particular existents and their interrelationships behind, paves the way for a

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repetition of genocide. The full intellectual confrontation with the Holocaust, one that takes in the details, the stories of individual suffering, of the mass exterminations, the bureaucratic machinery that churned out millions of deaths as if it were any other business endeavor, the direct participation of highly educated people who with their own hands executed Jews or performed grotesque medical experiments on them, leaves us without a foothold, without something, some aspect of culture, education, science, that was not drawn into the final solution. Where might we look to regain some hold on the real? The event of the Holocaust has left us intellectually paralyzed in our attempt to find the fullness of meaning that metaphysics promises: “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.” 14 We can find a foothold on the real only in that which was annihilated in the camps, the particular, the individual, the body, sensation, materiality. The passage quoted above is frequently given a pessimistic cast by interpreters who fail to understand that Adorno is not proposing resignation, but a recovery of metaphysics by way of a recovery of what metaphysics has left out traditionally—the particular existent. The principle of individuation (principium individuationis) is what was lost in reason’s progress. 15 The principle of individuation, what made the particular different was its unique material embodiment. Form without matter is not individuated, not incarnate, not instantiated in a being, in an existent in the world. Our discussion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment showed how the materiality of the individual became formalized and, hence, lost through the logic of self-preservation—a calculus of self-interest, which ultimately reduces the self to adaptability and reason to an instrument of manipulation. The formalization of reason generates indifference toward the particular individual, a metaphysical insignificance. Adorno writes, What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling skyward as smoke from this chimney,” bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots. 16

Metaphysics must, then, recover the gravity of the individual, of the particular existent and its suffering in order to regain its claim to intellectual grasp of the real. The individual is as real as the whole, no less real than the processes and events that impact upon the individual. A redeemed metaphysics must express the gravity of the particular, that which has eluded metaphysics, which placed the particular under the hegemony of a category or concept, as an example, as fungible, as a thing whose existence or non-existence is ultimately irrelevant to the constitution of meaning. What has eluded the concept is what must be recovered if metaphysics is to be more than the veil of imperishable meaning that hides the

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suffering of the perishable from the intellect; in Adorno’s words, “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.” 17 Negative dialectic endeavors to think that which has been excluded, ostracized, that which convicts the course of history of being in need of redemption. It thinks the world in the tension between the ostensibly progressive course of history and what it has crushed in its path. Put differently, negative dialectic refuses to sterilize the slaughter bench of history. Against Hegel’s reassurance that “the wounds of the spirit heal without leaving a scar,” negative dialectic attempts to think the ongoing effects of the wounds of history and their repetition. Negative dialectic, mimesis, and constellation are terms for the strategy of opening conceptual thought to what it has excluded; it is the reflection of thought upon itself that detects the ongoing tension between identity and non-identity, concept and object; constellations are what thought produces when it notes the inadequacy of the concept to its object and expands thought to articulate the object through a plurality of concepts—generated by the impact of the object upon the intellect and recognizing the inadequacy of conceptual though to exhaust the object; mimesis, the name for the likeness that does not identify, a similarity that allows differences to persist in the relation between subject and object, concept and object, human and human, human and nature. These strategies are facets of a standard of judgment infused with sensibility, of a movement of thought that generates meaning through thinking the relationship between the present, the forces that have prevailed to shape the present, and the possibilities for happiness that have been lost in the shaping of the present. This thought would be despair in the extreme were it not for the hope that the lost possibilities for happiness are not lost forever, but the very thinking of them gives rise to the discernment, the knowledge that things could indeed be different. 18 To think any object is to think the history locked within it. 19 It is fundamentally thinking the relationship (Adorno uses the phrase “field of forces”) between the concept (the accustomed way of capturing the object, of giving a secure meaning grounded in the present, a secure meaning that promises to perpetuate the present, to secure the self-preservation of the present way of things), and the object (the nexus of possibilities and contingencies, the immanent history with all of its lost possibilities which belie the necessity of the current conceptualization of the object, and hence hold out the promise that things might be otherwise), is fundamentally a relationship between the present and the not-yet, the present and what could have been and still could be. Oppression, genocide, the suffering inflicted on humans by humans is not the necessary or permanent condition of life. Adorno’s thought addresses the need to find the resources to prevent thought from capitulating to or collaborating with the

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forces that crush human lives. In light of the flaws that mar the dominant form of conceptual thought—the identity principle, and instrumental rationality—the only source of hope is to attempt to think what has eluded the concept, and this attempt leads us to the hope for redemption that drives Adorno’s philosophy and gives it its eschatological dimension. 20 POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS: DIFFERING VIEWS The previous chapter made the case that Adorno’s appropriation of eschatology and his turn toward aesthetics do not constitute a capitulation to irrationality, as Habermas contends. Instead, eschatology is the character that reason takes on when it recognizes its own situation of radical incompleteness. Reason cannot be complete or fully self-grounding; it cannot offer us a complete discursive account of the whole so long as there remains a chasm between human happiness and the course history has taken. Since Adorno and Benjamin take as a condition of redemption that the dead be brought into conversation with the present, nothing short of the resurrection of the flesh, allowing the victims of history to speak, could truly redeem the losses of the past. This goal is beyond the capacity of any political revolution. What, then, is the political upshot of Adorno’s eschatology and its sensuously infused judgment of history and society? There have been several different interpretations of this utopian moment in Adorno’s thought. The interpretation first offered by Lukàcs, and generally shared by many of Adorno’s contemporary critics, is that Adorno has checked into the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” by severing negative dialectics from any possible political practice. 21 This criticism takes on slightly different forms in the works of Habermas, Wellmer, and Benhabib, among others. 22 The general thrust of the criticism is that Adorno’s ideal of reconciliation between humankind and nature with all that it entails—a knowledge that is no longer centered on domination, a reason bound to the imperative to attend to the suffering of every person past, present, and future—offers us a critical ideal impossibly distant from any practice, or any strategy for altering practice. Hence, when evaluated by the initial aims of critical theory (as voiced in Horkheimer’s inaugural address) to generate a critical theory of society capable of transforming society, Adorno’s eschatology is a failure. It is at best a definitive account of the limitations of subjectcentered reason 23 and an announcement of a need for a new paradigm for social thought, 24 and at worst it is an excuse for brooding disappointed Marxist intellectuals to escape to abstract criticism and to avoid the risks of concrete proposals for practice. 25 Others have criticized Adorno for shying away from the radical political implications of his thought. This criticism has been leveled both from within critical theory (or what became known as the New Left) and from

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more conservative political theorists. Activists in the student movements during the late 1960s interpreted Adorno’s endeavor to bring the somatic and non-identical back into conceptual thought as a political proposal. 26 Adorno’s emphasis on the impulsive reaction to human suffering (found in passages such as the following from Negative Dialectics) was taken by student activists as “a justification for spontaneous resistance and spontaneous revolutionary activity”: 27 The impulse—naked physical fear, and the sense of solidarity with what Brecht called “tormentable bodies”—is immanent in moral conduct and would be denied in attempts at ruthless rationalization. What is most urgent would become contemplative again, mocking its own urgency. The theoretical meaning of the difference between theory and practice is that practice can no more be reduced to pure theory than it is choris of it. The two cannot be glued together in a synthesis. What has not been severed lives solely in the extremes, in a spontaneously stirring impatience with argumentation, in the unwillingness to let the horror go on, and in the theoretical discernment, unterrorized by commands, that shows us why the horror goes on anyway, ad infinitum. 28

Rolf Wiggershaus offers his interpretation of how this was understood by the student movement: The conviction that lay behind this was that the truth would be more likely to be found in critical situations that released strong impulses, in an epoch in which the manipulative character type had proved to be the most dangerous one, since such characters finished off their victims using administrative methods, and their sober intelligence and almost complete lack of emotion rendered them merciless . . . . In passages like these he became a philosopher of daring, presenting his fundamental intuitions in a suitable context. 29

Student activists were not alone in seeing radical revolutionary implications in Adorno’s philosophy. Among right wing political thinkers in cold war Germany, Adorno’s anti-systematic philosophy was seen as giving license for fragmentary terrorist resistance to the capitalist system. 30 George Friedman’s politically conservative interpretation of Adorno’s critical theory is in partial agreement with this interpretation of the radical political implications of Adorno’s philosophy. It is one of the possibilities of Adorno’s anti-systematic thought that it be mistaken for an endorsement of violent resistance to the social system. Adorno’s strategy of using concepts to unlock the non-conceptual, without allowing his formulations to be reassimilated by systematic thought is understood by Friedman as “akin to guerilla warfare, striking at the target in order to grasp its meaning but never holding the position long lest it be destroyed by the enemy and become indistinguishable from him.” 31 And Friedman adds, “To take a systematic stance would be to abandon the struggle against the system. Systems reconcile one to systems. In order to main-

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tain the war, we must take a more subtle if less elegant approach (which is, after all, the nature of guerilla warfare).” 32 This reference to guerilla warfare is more than a metaphorical characterization of critical theory according to Friedman: [T]he theoretical moment does not intend to remain within itself but rather to move to its antipode, to radical political practice. Its ultimate concern is with the real sensual world . . . . Ultimately, the cataclysmic exegetical transfiguration performed by the Frankfurt School on the world’s texts must be recapitulated in the cataclysmic revolutionary transfiguration that the Frankfurt School intends to perform on the world itself. 33

The Habermasian, New Left, and conservative right readings of Adorno all fail to engage the eschatological dimension of his thought and its relationship to political judgment. Differently stated, all of them fail to understand the mediation of the present and the not yet in Adorno’s thought, and that the tension between the two is not resolved, but in fact shapes the critical standpoint. Adorno’s metaphysics of the particular existent poses a challenge to ethical and political discourse. The truth of these discourses lies in the moral response to the divisions in social life, including the ultimate divisions created by oppression and killing. In so far as these discourses address “what there is” they must articulate the needs and interactions of particular persons. Adorno’s recasting of metaphysics is a metaphysics of the relations among beings, beings who have scars, who have perished senselessly and whose individual existence has not been rendered the slightest significance by what has traditionally gone by the name of metaphysics. THE NEW CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE Adorno’s metaphysics, then, clearly has a moral dimension, or, rather the eschatological dimension of his thought carries with it a political ethic. We can see the interrelationship between his attempt to render materiality metaphysically significant and the political significance of metaphysics in the following passage: A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives. 34

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The integration of materiality into metaphysics includes the integration of sensibility into political thought in a way that was utterly absent in the murder technicians of the Third Reich. Recall from the discussion in chapter 4, Rudolf Höss was able to continue his horrific work because feeling, the feeling of revulsion at taking part in the live immolation of Jewish infants and children, was, as Eichmann assured him, not morally or politically significant. That Adorno’s “Meditations on Metaphysics” is motivated by the greatest political atrocity in history is significant. Metaphysics has political significance and politics has metaphysical significance. This relationship is not lost on the history of philosophy, and was of central importance for Ancient and Medieval thought. In this sense, Adorno is well within the tradition of political philosophy by addressing this question. Adorno’s recast metaphysics takes the realm of the contingent and perishable—the realm of politics—as inseparable from philosophical truth. Such thinking is impossible for identitarian thought, for thinking in stereotypes, for treating the event in all of its complexity as equal to the concept. In light of the urgent need to respond to genocide, we can say that we have seen in the events of the Holocaust the effect of severing our understanding of moral and political rationality from compassion. The sensibility required for political thought and for the exigencies of politics after Auschwitz is compassion. The need to lend a voice to human suffering is a condition of all truth, as it is the condition of justice. 35 The condition of a discourse on justice is that the discourse be a language in which our suffering can be expressed and given a central role in the determination of political practice. Justice cannot be conceived without attention to the suffering generated by material conditions. Adorno remains within the tradition of Marxist thought in this sense. Suffering would become a will-o’-the-wisp, another ideological catchword, were it to lose its moorings in materiality, in bodily suffering. What compassion in political practice must mean, then, is generally, lending a voice to the poor and to those who are most likely to be seriously effected by the course of political events and policies, those whose very lives and livelihood depend upon the decisions made in the forging of laws and institutions. It is these voices that should be the most strongly considered in political deliberation. Politics will never be without suffering, nor should it embrace violence or console itself over the blood it has shed. Conscience is forged through being able to be disturbed by the terrible exclusions and suffering perpetrated within political life. A political ethic does not promise to get politics right, or to never cause anyone any harm; it promises, however, that political action might be guided by the perpetuation of the good manifest in the interaction of human beings, the well-being of the governed. To do this, political thought must be able to recognize evil and be able to alter its course. A politics guided by distinguishing good and

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evil, this is what classical politics has promised since Aristotle, and this is what stands as an alternative to a politics guided merely by security, or, after the exaggeration of the principle of self-preservation, a feeling of security, efficiency, and brute power. Adorno offers us a metaphysics of the ephemeral, of the vulnerable particular in its relationship to the absolute—which forgets and dismisses neither its vulnerability nor its particularity. The metaphysics of the vulnerable refuses to degrade or de-emphasize the reality of political struggle as an arena within which our grasp upon what is and what we shall become is determined. A redeemed metaphysics compels us to ask of every endeavor, every thought or idea that places a claim upon human action, what is the human cost, what is at stake for those who are most likely to suffer from this? Only then will sensibility and concept be thought together. We should also remember that this is centrally a problem of human solidarity. The separation of concept and object is also a separation of humans from each other. Relating to stereotypes instead of persons, to concepts instead of empirical persons and situations creates divisions within the human species, divisions marked by hatred, indifference and war. All such divisions are the fruit of either indifference toward or positive inducement of the suffering of the other. It is in our mindfulness of suffering that we are united or divided as a species. Having a language in which our deepest sufferings can be voiced and heard over the repetitive din of stereotypes is the task of Adorno’s philosophy. The requirement that we ask of every claim upon human action—what does this mean for those who are most likely to suffer from the effect, what impact will this policy or theory have in terms of its impact on human lives—this is the heart of the political ethic generated by the metaphysics of vulnerability. A metaphysics which is, perhaps more accurately, an eschatology, a sensuously infused judgment upon history. NOTES 1. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 11. 2. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 15; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 27. 3. The following remark concisely summarizes what distinguishes thinking the object through a multiplicity of concepts (a constellation) rather than subordinating the object to the concept. “By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the ‘more’ which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 162; Gesammelte Schriften VI, pp. 164–165. 4. “It is the matter, not the organizing drive of thought, that brings us to dialectics.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 144; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 148.

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5. “[T]here actually is a mental experience—fallible indeed, but immediate—of the essential and the unessential, an experience which only the scientific need for order can forcibly talk subjects out of. Where there is no such experience, knowledge stays unmoved and barren. Its measure is what happens objectively to the subjects, as their suffering.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 170; Gesammelte Schriften VI, pp. 171–172. 6. Ibid., p. 207; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p.207. 7. Ibid., pp. 17–18; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p.29. 8. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, (London: MacMillan Press, 1978), p. 43. 9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 150; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 151. 10. Ibid., p. 361; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 354. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 362; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 355. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid.; Gesammelte Schriften, p. 355. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 365; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 358. 18. The reality of the possibilities illuminated through negative dialectic is a point frequently missed in interpretations of Adorno’s thought. In a discussion with Bloch concerning the nature of utopian longing, Adorno stated, “[M]y thesis about this would be that all humans deep down, whether they admit this or not, know that it would be possible or it could be different. Not only could they live without hunger and probably without anxiety, but they could also live as free human beings.” This excerpt is from “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 4. 19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 52, 153. This claim is made in many places and implied throughout Adorno’s work. I offer only two notable locations within Negative Dialectics. 20. It is worth quoting at length the dialogue from “Something’s Missing,” which brings out the eschatological dimension within materialist social criticism as both Adorno and Bloch understood it. Bloch: “People must fill their stomachs, and then they can dance. That is a conditio sine qua non for being able to talk earnestly about the other without it being used for deception. Only when all the guests have sat down at the table can the Messiah, can Christ come. Thus Marxism in its entirety, even when brought in in its most illuminating form and anticipated in its entire realization, is only a condition for a life in freedom, life in happiness, life in possible fulfillment, life with content.” Adorno: “We have come strangely close to the ontological proof of God . . . . All of this comes from what you said when you used the phrase borrowed from Brecht—something’s missing—a phrase that we actually cannot have if seeds or ferment of what this phrase denotes were not possible. Actually I would think that unless there is no kind of trace of truth in the ontological proof of God, that is, unless the element of its reality is also already conveyed in the power of the concept itself, there could not only be no utopia but there could also not be any thinking.” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, pp. 15–16. 21. George Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 22. See also, Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 17–18. 22. See Sena Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 186–223. 23. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 315. 24. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p. 233.

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25. Zoltan Tar, The Critical Theories of Horkheimer and Adorno (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 202–207. 26. See chapter 7. 27. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 606. 28. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 286; Gesammelte Schriften VI, pp. 281–282. 29. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurter School, p. 606. 30. Albrecht Wellmer notes that this is a central feature of conservative rhetoric directed against critical Marxism. See “Terrorism and the Critique of Society” in Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 283–307. 31. George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 222. 32. Ibid., p. 233. 33. Ibid., p. 225. 34. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365; Gesammelte Schriften VI, p. 358. 35. Ibid., p. 204; Gesammelte Schriften VI, pp. 203–204.

SEVEN Democracy as the Critique of Fascism

ADORNO AND DEMOCRATIC ACTION Considering the political implications of Adorno’s thought should take us further than the exploration of a disposition toward politics or an awareness of the social, political and historical situation of thought. Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, Minima Moralia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment have no clear direction leading from theory to the proscription of specific political commitments and practices. It has often been hastily concluded that Adorno’s proclamation that “there is no good life in a false one” leaves his critical theory in the position of cultural criticism merely. The meticulous inquiry into the mediation of every facet of our experience by the culture industry, the administered world, identity thinking and the specter of genocide that haunts these modes of social mediation and thought is valuable as a mode of critical analysis, but little more. Following this line of reasoning, Adorno’s critical theory cannot provide guidance regarding what to do; it can only tell us how to think about what we are doing. Differently stated, Adorno’s critical theory is cultural critique, but not political critique; it does not provide guidance regarding how and where to intervene so that we might begin to do things differently. Those who have reached the conclusion that the usefulness of Adorno’s theory is limited to cultural critique, but utterly deficient as political critique, have done so with good reason. In an interview with Der Spiegel following the disruption of his lectures by student activists in April, 1969, Adorno insisted that his work “had never supplied the model for any acts or political actions whatever.” 1 And his correspondence with Herbert Marcuse regarding the student protests offers further confirmation for the view that Adorno was a purist guardian of theory against the unripe revolutionary impulses of the student movement. 2 107

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Still, Adorno’s own conclusion that his thought supplies “no model for any acts or political actions whatsoever” grates against decades of his work, which was not merely theoretical or scholarly but seemed intended to have a definite effect on political dispositions, public perceptions, and, especially, education institutions in post WWII Germany. Adorno’s decade of work on decoding propaganda, 3 his over 160 public radio addresses given after he returned to Germany, and his work on democratizing education invites a different conclusion regarding the relationship of his theory to political action. DEMOCRATIC ACTION IN THE ADMINISTERED WORLD Adorno’s period of emigration to the United States was famously prolific. Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment are doubtless the bestknown products of this period. Adorno’s contribution to the Authoritarian Personality and its various studies of the sources of anti-Semitism in America, Adorno and Horkheimer saw as a complementary to their work on the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 4 Adorno’s study of the propaganda techniques of anti-Democratic agitators in America—especially the radio addresses of Martin Luther Thomas 5— were not simply an empirical gloss on the seemingly dark prognosis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s interest in the Authoritarian Personality and in his study of the propaganda techniques of fascist agitators was in “the emerging of the authoritarian personality” and how this “emerging” might be thwarted by disrupting the effect of propaganda techniques on the public mind. These studies were intended to have implications for democratic practice. In September, 1948, Adorno was invited to participate in a symposium on “Democratic Action” at the University of Buffalo. In his acceptance letter, Adorno summarized the content of his proposed article as follows: Democratic action does not merely imply the action of the “compact majority” but rather action conscious of the basic implications of democracy. This is particularly important in a world in which anti-democratic forces are bred within the womb of democracy itself. What is needed is not democratic manipulation but an attempt to induce people to take an autonomous stand on essential issues and not to fall in for manipulation. The danger that has to be fought is that large masses become reduced to ideological automatons merely reflecting what is being hammered into their heads by various means of “psycho-technics.” What is required is an emancipation of consciousness in the age of mass culture. One of the most critical zones in this respect is the artificially promoted irrationality of the leader figure and popular identification with “leaders.” 6

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One distillation of the studies on propaganda was the cultivation of the potential for democratic action—“action conscious of the basic implications of democracy.” The idea that the manipulative techniques that hold mass democracy enthralled were not the product of an unavoidable historical destiny impervious to any intervention was alien to Adorno. 7 The philosophy of history developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment should lead us to the conclusion that the administered world is contingent throughand-through. There is no aspect of it that could not be otherwise, that could not be made more human when we intervene in the right way, at the right time. In the letter, Adorno further emphasizes that the findings of the various studies on fascist propaganda, should be translated into action—not in “propaganda” but in enlightenment. An attempt in this direction will be a pamphlet, prepared jointly by Dr. Horkheimer and myself, which does not only expose the agitator’s favorite devices but explains them and brings to the fore those dispositions within the listeners on which the agitators play. The general idea is one of “vaccination.” The aim is not to blunt people’s minds by one more piece of propaganda but to lead them towards reflecting about their own inarticulate attitudes and opinions. 8

The article Adorno summarized in his letter became “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” the general theme of which is the danger posed to democracy by the leader image on which authoritarian tendencies congeal. 9 Democratic action requires the unraveling of the psychological techniques that prevent individuals from coming to conscious awareness of their situation, an awareness of how propaganda is at work in the shaping of public opinion. While Adorno does not present us with a full-blown positive theory of how an autonomous public might act, this should hardly be taken as a retreat from political action. It is a return of the individual to a state of political competence and maturity, which would remain a leading theme of Adorno’s public addresses and the goal of his pedagogy. ADORNO ON EDUCATION AND RESISTANCE True to Adorno’s notion of negative dialectic, there is no meaningful notion of democracy in isolation from its confrontation with fascism, racism and authoritarian tendencies. Any meaningful democracy is a practice in lived tension with fascism. Allowing the individual to carve out a pocket of resistance, enabling particularity to speak in opposition to the general movement of opinion and social forces requires meticulous resistance to the psychological and political forces of fascism. Providing a space in which this resistance might occur was the theme of many of Adorno’s public radio lectures.

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Before returning to Germany, Adorno contributed to a radio program on resistance to Hitler, in which he was asked why there was so little popular resistance to the Hitler regime. Adorno responded, This is extremely difficult to answer, I think one has to do justice to the situation, that is to say, nobody who didn’t live under a fascist dictatorship or any type of totalitarian dictatorship can imagine to what extent the whole system and the atmosphere of terror that permeates every sphere of life prevents any effective action. Measured against the omnipotence of the dictatorship, the impotence of individual resistance is quite understandable. 10

Adorno was quick to dispel the legend that the rebellion of the military leaders in the July 20 plot (“Operation Valkyrie”) were fundamentally opposed to Hitler. The genuine resistance, Adorno insisted, “came from those whose names we will never know” and from the students. 11 When Adorno was asked whether he found it “astonishing that members of the resistance were very young, 24 years or so, born into Hitler’s era and brought up in fascistic times” he replied that “this is not at all surprising that resistance should come from those who are not yet jaded by the ways of the world that they accept those ways even when they lead to the concentration camp.” 12 After his return to Germany, Adorno’s teaching endeavored to nurture the critical disposition of those who were “not yet jaded” by the administered world. Like his conception of democracy, Adorno’s conception of education is dialectical, defined in lived opposition to the barbarism of Auschwitz: Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against. 13

Adorno’s hopes for changing circumstances remained modest and were always directed primarily at altering tendentially authoritarian subjectivity and psychology. 14 Of course, Adorno’s social theory would tell us that any change in subjective disposition is relational. There must be objective circumstances that effect the subjective change. Removing from education the tendency toward discipline for its own sake and hazing rituals (academic and otherwise) requires a change, however modest, in institutions and practices. Adorno makes a host of such suggestions in “Education after Auschwitz”—television programs and mobile groups of volunteer teachers to counteract the prejudice created by deficiencies in rural education; the thorough psychological study of perpetrators of genocide; an educational environment in which students are encouraged to express their anxieties and grievances. 15 Measures such as these might create an educational environment in which “the single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz” might be cultivated: “autonomy . . .

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the power of self-reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.” 16 While what can be achieved through education alone is limited, Adorno believed this was the locus where the mechanisms that produce the subject are most starkly evident and most capable of transformation. ADORNO AND THE STUDENT MOVEMENT Adorno hoped to cultivate the kind of students he mentioned decades before in his reference to the White Rose: “educating people toward the possibility of something better, instead of having them swear an oath to what exists.” 17 The central role of education in Adorno’s endeavors to intervene in the shape of German culture seems cruelly ironic in light of his ultimately tumultuous relationship to the student activists toward the end of his life. His tense relationship to the student movement is often noted as the definitive mark of the practical deficit in Adorno’s critical theory. It is tempting to place Adorno in the venerable list of philosophers stretching back through Heidegger and Marx to Plato whose attempts at political engagement proved disastrous or failed utterly. This temptation might not be entirely misleading in Adorno’s case, but a few misconceptions should be avoided. Even an observer as astute as Martin Jay espouses the view that Adorno was an aloof and fundamentally apolitical thinker: There was [in Adorno’s work] no sustained discussion of the public sphere, bourgeois democracy, the state or political organization in his work. . . . Although Adorno staunchly rejected the accusation that he was really an apolitical aesthete, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there was what many German critics liked to call a “political deficit” in his theory. For when Adorno spoke of power, it was almost always in terms of a pervasive and diffuse domination that transcended any identifiable political realm. 18

Undoubtedly, Adorno’s notion of political subjectivity leaves only so much room for transformative practice, but he goes to great lengths to show where this modest transformation might be possible. The subject is not an independent standpoint on the social world, but is the product of heteronomous influences. The forces shaping the subject can be reflected upon, however, and this reflection does not leave its objective conditions unaltered. 19 Adorno was adamant that the locus of reflection is the particular, not a collective subject or agency that enjoys the support of dominant historical forces but the estranged thought set against them. Where the student protests seemed to draw from this impetus, Adorno vocally and actively supported their efforts, and the more the student movement veered toward collective thought and action, the more he tried to maintain a critical distance from the movement.

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In his presentation to the Conference of German Sociologists in Frankfurt in April 1968, while anti-Vietnam War protests in Frankfurt had reached a fever pitch, Adorno made clear his stance on the student protests as a site of progressive consciousness: It is only in recent times that signs of a counter-tendency are becoming visible in various groups of young people: resistance against blind adjustment, freedom for rationally chosen goals, disgust before the world of swindles and illusions, meditations on the possibility of transformation. Whether the socially ever-increasing drive towards destruction triumphs in spite of this, only time will tell. 20

Shortly thereafter, Adorno organized an event, “Democracy in a State of Emergency,” in solidarity with the student movement to condemn the Emergency Laws of May 1968. Adorno spoke at the event and, according to Stephan Müller-Doohm, advised the students, “[I]t was necessary to protest as vigorously as possible against the emergency laws on the grounds that they were a legal device to undermine democracy.” 21 In the previous year when students protesting the visit of the Shah of Iran clashed with police, leaving one student, Benno Ohnesorg, dead, Adorno opened his lecture with a moment of silence for Ohnesorg: The desire that the inquiry [into Ohnesorg’s death] should be carried out in complete freedom, uninfluenced by authoritarian wishes and in accordance with the spirit of democracy, is one that I do not think of as only my own private wish, but as one that arises from the objective situation. I presume that you share it. I now invite you to stand in memory of our dead colleague, Benno Ohnesorg. 22

Adorno’s disposition toward the student movement was anything but aloof. At least as late as April of 1968, his attitude toward the movement remained positive and engaged. The disposition of the student movement toward Adorno had become ambivalent, however, well before then. It was well known among the students that Adorno’s position on the Vietnam War differed from that of Max Horkheimer. During a panel with Horkheimer and the leaders of the SDS to discuss the Vietnam War protests, Adorno took a middle position, critical of the reactionary authorities opposed to the students and also critical of the students’ view that objective conditions called for revolutionary action. In Adorno’s unflattering expression, the students’ protests “resembled the actions of caged animals seeking a way out.” 23 Shortly afterward, Adorno gave a lecture on Goethe’s Iphagenie at the Free University of Berlin, where the students greeted him with the banner “Berlin’s Left-Wing Fascists Greet Teddy the Clacissist,” and when the lecture was over, a female student mockingly presented him with a red teddy bear. 24 Through the summer and fall of 1968 Adorno’s relationship to the student movement became stressed. The students “repurposed” class-

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rooms for teach-ins and often interrupted Adorno’s lectures insisting that he take a public stand on the issues of concern to the movement. The matter came to a head on January 31, 1969, when a group of students led by Hans-Jürgen Krahl, attempted to occupy the sociology seminar rooms at the Institute for Social Research. Adorno and the directors of the Institute asked for police assistance “in clearing the intruders.” 25 When Adorno returned from his sabbatical in April of that year, his lectures were disrupted by student activists with such regularity that he was unable to continue lecturing. 26 Whatever lesson we might draw from Adorno’s troubles with the student movement, it is hardly a lesson in aloofness or the recoil of an ivory tower theorist from the practice his theory called for. Adorno’s concerns regarding the conformist and collectivist “direct action” tactics of the students are clearly in accord with his critical theory, which locates resistance in the particular. Unless we share the view of orthodox Marxism—to which Adorno devoted a life of criticism—that meaningful political agency flows from a collective subject, we cannot convict Adorno of apolitical aestheticism. Adorno’s theory held out the possibility for a different kind of solidarity—one in which we can be different without fear. NOTES 1. Stephan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 477. 2. According to Stephan Müller-Doohm, in Adorno’s correspondence with Marcuse at the height of the student protests, “at issue was not any disagreement about how to conceptualize the relation of theory and practice. It was rather their differing interpretation of the political situation which led the two men to different conclusions.” Marcuse believed the student movement had seized upon a truly revolutionary objective situation. Adorno differed. Ibid., p. 462. 3. Adorno’s work on the techniques of fascist agitators was not merely theoretical. He hoped that the work might culminate in the publication of instruction booklets for public distribution that might dispel the stereotypes operative in anti-Semitic propaganda. “Iconographies of Anti-Semitism,” January 9, 1945. Adorno Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Ts 52690–52695. 4. Ibid., p. 292. 5. Theodor Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 6. Letter to Alvin Ward Gouldner, September 30, 1948. Adorno Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Ts. 49514. 7. “Far from being the source of fascism, psychology has become one element among others in a superimposed system the very totality of which is necessitated by the potential mass of resistance—the masses’ own rationality.” Theodor Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 151. 8. Ibid. 9. Adorno and Horkheimer, “Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation,” in Vermischte Schriften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), pp. 267–286. 10. Adorno Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Ta 353.

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11. Ibid. Adorno is referring here to the students of “The White Rose” group at the University of Munich. 12. Ibid. 13. Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 191. 14. “I wish, however, to emphasize especially that the recurrence or nonrecurrence of fascism in its decisive aspect is not a question of psychology, but of society. I speak so much of the psychological only because the other, more essential aspects lie so far out of reach of the influence of education, if not the intervention of individuals altogether.” Ibid., p. 194. 15. Ibid., pp. 196–198. 16. Ibid., p. 195. 17. Ibid., p. 303. 18. Martin Jay, Adorno, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 86. 19. “We are not only spectators looking upon this predominance of the institutional and the objective that confronts us; rather it is after all constituted out of us, this societal objectivity is made up of us ourselves. In this doubledness, that we are subject and object of this society surely lies precisely also the possibility of perhaps changing it.” Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” p. 298. 20. Theodor Adorno. Late Capitalism or Industrial Society, trans. Dennis Redmond (Creative Commons, 2001), www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1968/latecapitalism.htm. Also cited in Müller-Doohm. Adorno: A Biography, p. 444. 21. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, p. 451. 22. Ibid., p. 452. 23. Ibid., p. 454. 24. Ibid., p. 455. 25. Ibid., p. 465. 26. The most famous of these disruptions was the “bared-breasts incident,” in which three female students partially disrobed and scattered flower petals over Adorno while another student wrote “Adorno as an institution is dead” on the board. Adorno died just four months after the incident. Ibid., p. 475. For a thorough discussion of the significance of this event in relation to the feminist current in Adorno’s thought, see Lisa Yun Lee, “The Bared-Breasts Incident” in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno, (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006), pp. 113–139.

EIGHT Genocide, Political Judgment, and the Prison Industrial Complex

It can be argued that any unrelenting criticism of the concepts we use to justify institutions, social norms and practices is bound to have political implications. Whether or not practices enjoy an undisturbed discourse of legitimacy or face radical criticism and scrutiny has effects on what we do and how we do it. Adorno’s work provides us with more than a blanket negation of present practice. A new mode of judgment weighted toward the particular allows us to use practical, legal concepts in a different way, one in which present practices can be placed in question in their own terms. The political relevance of Adorno’s thought extends beyond the analysis of propaganda, critical pedagogy and cultivating an awareness of how concepts are mediated by social domination. The foregoing chapters have argued that Adorno’s critical theory is more than cultural critique, that it is also political. An awareness of how thought is complicit in social domination and the continuity between the administered world and Auschwitz changes our disposition toward how concepts are used in practice. Ever since Raphael Lemkin invented the term and succeeded in the effort to make it operative in international law, “genocide” has been a contested term. When Matulu Shakur claims 1 that the U.S. penal system is part of a genocidal apparatus, it surely sounds hyperbolic in the ears of the political mainstream, for whom the term “genocide” is associated with mass graves, crematoria, gas chambers, forced migration, orchestrated famine and ghettoization. Missing from this mainstream judgment about what is and what is not genocide is an understanding of the genesis of concepts in the face of experiences for which we have no word. The movement of the intellect from the tactile encounter with the faces, testimonials, images of emaciated bodies, the remnants of human life bereft 115

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of humanity, conveys a meaning, a visceral sense that this ought never to be. This experiential field is what gives rise to the conceptual effort to mark experiences of a similar kind, to categorize and clarify an experience that is not a concept but that still possesses meaning. There is a difference between using a formal definition or concept as an instrument for classifying experiences as similar and moving from a nonconceptual field to a unifying concept. Both of these ways of judging are at work in any meaningful conceptualization of experience. The prevalent tendency of our formal, legal reasoning is to privilege the former mode of judgment (in which we begin with a definition and look for particular cases that fall under it) over the latter mode of judgment. This is another way of stating Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of conceptualization, “all concepts refer to nonconceptualities,” and these “do not enter into their concepts without leaving a remainder.” 2 In what follows, these two modes of judgment are explored as prerequisite for making sense of Shakur’s charge of genocide against the penal system and the government of the United States. I draw from J.M. Bernstein’s reading of Adorno to clarify Adorno’s critique of conceptuality and what this critique brings to our thinking about the constellation of forces that have made genocide a fixture on the political horizon of the last century. We will then be in a position to consider the legitimacy of Mutulu Shakur’s claim that the penal system is genocidal. Shakur’s claim is more than rhetorical in the usual meaning of the term. His argument is richly rhetorical in a way that returns the concept of genocide to its experiential content. JUDGMENT AND GENOCIDE When Raphael Lemkin formulated the definition of genocide that appears in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it was in response to atrocities for which no legal term existed. 3 A confluence of historical forces—imperialism, nationalism, racist political ideology, propaganda, bureaucracy and technology— made it possible to mobilize, displace and destroy entire populations: an experience for which there was no concept. Lemkin’s concept is over half a century old. We can weigh particular atrocities to determine whether they fit the criteria in Article II. In each case, we can see whether the particular can be subsumed under the universal to determine whether the provisions of the 1948 Convention and the concomitant duties of its signatories apply to the case at hand. In the vast majority of cases, this has left the international community looking back upon an atrocity that has already occurred to determine whether the crime, already committed, fits the definition of genocide. At its worst, the definition has been speciously evaded to disavow responsibility to take serious preventive action. The moral imperative behind the 1948 Convention, that genocide

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must “never again” be allowed to occur, is betrayed by the after-the-fact manner in which the definition of genocide is used in practice. The experiences that required the generation of a new concept also require the refusal to sever the relationship between concepts and the complexity of the experiences that give rise to them; only by respecting that relationship can our concepts open up the possibility of creating a better world, and not merely categorize the horror of the world as it is. If we take the definition of genocide in Article II as a list of criteria for rendering a determinative judgment about particular acts of political violence and coercion, as is often done, we have already accepted a fundamental assumption about the relationship between experience and conceptualization. On this view, the concept of genocide is understood along a logical axis: 4 “If X falls under any of the categories of activities listed in Article II, then X is genocide.” We readily accept this as the standard way in which determinative judgments are made, by subsuming a particular under a universal: a specific content is judged to belong within the formal category. The determinative mode of judgment leaves us thinking about genocide as a criminal prosecutor might. Instead of moving quickly to end the atrocity we see unfolding before us, we wait and build a case for indicting the perpetrators. The long record of international inaction in the face of genocide has borne this out all too clearly. Following this line of reasoning, the charge of genocide can be more definitively proven, more facts falling under the subsections of Article II can be assessed, after the atrocities have occurred. The international community stands on the sideline with a legal category, waiting for the appropriate content that would allow it to make the claim “S is P,” S is genocide. While this mode of cognition is in a certain sense indispensable, it is not exhaustive of our capacity for conceptualization and judgment. We need to judge in the face of contents without form, in the face of atrocities ongoing prior to their clear legal categorization. Political and ethical judgment requires a mode of thinking that can judge, discern and act in the face of experiences that cannot be readily subsumed under some antecedently known universal. Immanuel Kant first distinguished these two modes of judgment: determinative and reflective. 5 On Kant’s account, reflective judgment operates in the realm of aesthetics, and not within morality, law or the realm of practical reason in which we judge the moral rightness of our actions by their conformity with universal principle (the categorical imperative). Adorno contests Kant’s relegation of reflective judgment to aesthetics alone. On Adorno’s view, reflective judgment—our encounter with experiences the meaning of which is not exhausted by their categorization under some universal concept—is the forgotten dimension of every determinative judgment. Following Adorno, we need to push Kant’s insight that “concepts without content are empty and content without concepts are blind” a step further and assert that concepts that disavow their origi-

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nal dependency on content (experience) are both empty and blind—both abstract and unable to guide practice. DETERMINATIVE AND REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT If we consider Shakur’s allegation from the distance provided by our possession of the concept of genocide as a definition separable from any particular case, we will proceed as we might regarding any empirical claim. I can make the empirical judgment that the arrangement of metal and synthetic wood I’m sitting on is a chair. The judgment involved in subsuming this particular experience under the concept (“This is a chair.”) is unproblematic when the chair is like so many others and the experience familiar. This unproblematic judgment that proceeds from a possessed concept disposes with the process of acquiring or generating a concept in the face of new experiences for which a concept is lacking or for which there is no clear rule according to which my experience might be identified as an instance of “chair.” In a case involving a concept that is just emerging, our ability to make a determinative judgment is even more challenged. Adorno’s critique of conceptuality exposes the dependency of conceptual unity (determinative judgment) on the preconceptual unity of experience. What determinative judgment tends to occlude is the process of concept acquisition and its performative and rhetorical aspects. In the face of new experience, we are in the position of what J.M. Bernstein terms “the conceptual neophyte.” Experience of particulars in the absence of a unifying concept requires a different mode of judgment. Kant termed this mode of cognition reflective judgment, which does not culminate in a concept; it reveals “the process of conceptualizing without a conceptual result.” 6 Reflective judgment exposes the dimension of conceptualization occluded in determinative judgment. An awareness of the experiential, social, political context from which concepts emerge and on which they operate is the at the heart of Adorno’s dialectical philosophy: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.” 7 The conceptual activity of identifying a field of experience as experience of a certain type or kind is dependent upon an experiential field that never falls fully into its identifying concept. In Adorno’s terminology, identity is dependent upon the nonidentical. Recovering the nonconceptual dimension of concepts requires keeping the object of thought before us, maintaining contact with the object by recovering the process of searching for a concept in the face of new experience. While Adorno’s primary model for this is aesthetic experience, we should be mindful that his claim extends to cover the dependency of all conceptualization on reflective judgment. Bernstein writes,

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[I]n aesthetic experience, we are invariably radically dependent on the object for our understanding of it . . . meaning here is noting other than an arrangement of material elements . . . our grasping of the meaning remains sensory, remains bound to the acts which accomplish it, remains something accomplished in the very act of hearing or seeing (and not through it). 8

Reflective judgment always retains an intransitive meaning that is bound to the experiential encounter with the object: Because understanding of the work [of art] is sensorily bound, it cannot be communicated without remainder. I can aid and inspire you to see what I see, but the comprehension is the seeing itself (thusly), and hence nondetachable from the experience which gives rise to it. 9

Because the unity experienced cannot be communicated transitively or conceptually, “the unity in question must be grasped and felt; what is there appears whole and integral to me. Since there is no concept to hold that unity together, to represent that unity and articulate it, then what unity there is must be held in mind.” 10 This cognitive humility that holds the object before the mind, not allowing the complexity of its contours to vanish into the concept, is the cost of responding to the claim of experience upon conceptuality. It delivers the vulnerability of experience back to the concept without, it must be noted, dissolving the concept. Adorno is not arguing, as he is often misread, for the abolition of identity thinking or determinative judgment. Instead, he is introducing a critical theory of conceptualization that retains the identical and non-identical axes of the concept in a more capacious and critical understanding of the limits of conceptualization. What this means for the case at hand is that judgment regarding genocide must be understood both reflectively and determinatively. When we approach the issue only in the mode of determinative judgment, we stand apart from the experience, holding court, deliberating whether the atrocity in question falls under Article II. What we cut away in this move is the experience of the victims and our own always imperfect endeavor to see what they see and feel what they feel. Attention to the rhetorical and performative dimensions of judgment is indispensable in conceptualizing genocide. Attending to the specificity of the experience of the victims of genocide informs our sense of what it is and why it is intolerable. The historical specificity of the 1948 Convention is not lost on us when the term “genocide” is invoked. It is the unfortunate tendency of this awareness to be frozen, affixed to the image of genocide conveyed by the Holocaust alone. The dependency of the law on the events and experiences for which the victims had no word or concept is forgotten even if the historical events are not. This dependency should be recalled, integrated into how we think about genocide and what warrants a global response. If the historical moment of the emer-

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gence of the concept becomes frozen, then the moral imperative, “never again,” becomes tethered to only one historical instance of genocide, only those atrocities and mass killings that bear the same features as the Nazi genocide. A recovery of the dependency of the concept on experience leaves our judgment capacious and responsive to the ways in which the modern world has left entire populations vulnerable to dehumanization and extermination. Our thinking about genocide does not progress by finding or identifying a paradigm case, or by formalizing a historical experience into a paradigm. Our progress should be measured by how well we can overcome our tendency to silence the experience of human vulnerability and suffering in thought and action. MIMESIS: INTRANSITIVE MEANING Our endeavor to find a language in which our suffering can be understood is thwarted by the muteness of suffering. We know it when we feel it, but this knowledge is not discursive, its meaning is not transitive. But this does not leave human suffering beyond moral thought or moral response. Adorno’s case is that intransitive meaning is a necessary condition of conceptualization. Concepts depend upon meaning that cannot be conceptualized but can be felt, seen, experienced. Recovering that dependency and its role in conceptualization is at the heart of Adorno’s notion of the priority of the object, the tode ti. In this sense, Adorno, not unlike Aristotle, insists on the meaningfulness of entities in their materiality and not by reference to some form beyond them. Bernstein elucidates this point nicely: Meaning that is discovered in the object is not its meaning in terms of something else, through something else, in virtue of something else. If this object reflectively means at all, it means intrinsically or intransitively; its meaning is articulate, structured, but not further articulable. 11

When we attend to the details of the experience of human suffering, not naming it or classifying it, but feeling it along with its own contours, which are those of the vulnerable bodies of its victims, the claim of this unity stands without reference to a concept. The active passivity of taking in the details of an experience, of following the folds of its intelligibility without referring or subsuming this intelligibility under a concept, allows us to consider the claim of this experience against the ways in which it is conceptualized and categorized. This “following along and coexecution” of thought with experience is what Adorno terms the mimetic dimension of thought; in this mode of thought, “the goal is not to reach a general identification, but to cognize the elements as configured in their own right, to see or hear that there is order and meaning.” 12 Fidelity to the

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contours of experience grates against the tendency of determinate judgment to discern the similarities between one region of experience and another. Mimetic fidelity to experience keeps us attuned to those aspects of the object that conceptualization tends to cut away when we attempt to render the meaning of the experience in universal and transitive terms. Mimesis is our hold upon the intransitive meaning of the nonconceptual: Because intransitive understanding is not directly communicable, then typically intransitive meaning and understanding is communicated performatively or rhetorically; the performative/rhetorical dimensions of language are employed precisely to halt transitive comprehension and reorient understanding toward the object itself. 13

Adorno endeavors to return conceptualization to sensibility, to how we feel the world. Moral concepts are stultified when they lose contact with the experiences that call for moral response and make them affectively compelling. The mimetic appeal to sensibility is the vulnerable fulcrum for changing our moral perception of the world. Angela Davis recounts an act of protest against invasive body searches in women’s prisons as follows: At a November 2001 conference on women in prison held by the Brisbane-based organization Sisters Inside, Amanda George described an action performed before a national gathering of correctional personnel working in women’s prisons. Several women seized control of the stage and, some playing guards, others playing the roles of prisoners, dramatized a strip search. According to George, the gathering was so repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women’s prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from such practices, insisting that this was not what they did. Some of the guards, George said, simply cried upon watching the representations of their own actions outside the prison context. What they must have realized is that without the uniform, without the power of the state, [the strip search] would be sexual assault. 14

The protesters theatric portrayal of the strip search was more moving, and more precise in conveying the meaning of the searches, than any argument regarding the indignity of the routine dehumanizing practice. The intransitive (nonconceptual) meaning of their experience presented in a context in which others could see and feel the contours of their experience had a transformative effect on the disposition of the audience, it conveyed a greater affective breadth in their audience—a meaning that is transformative of moral perception and not merely an inarticulate noise, meaningless without a concept.

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RHETORIC AND REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT In “Genocide against the Black Nation in the U.S. Penal System,” Mutulu Shakur accuses the penal system is engaged in a coordinated, low-intensity warfare campaign to eliminate radical leaders of African, Hispanic and Puerto Rican descent with the broader aim of nullifying the cultural identity and political agency of these groups. Shakur conveys in detail the “behavior modification” program to which he and other prisoners were routinely subjected. The program involved measures designed to dissolve opportunities for contact between prisoners and to destroy any sense of agency. Extended periods of solitary confinement were routinely employed “to effectively break or seriously weaken close emotional ties” and to convince the prisoners “that they have been abandoned by and totally isolated from the social order.” 15 Shakur describes the scientific and methodical character of the program that couples isolation with close observation and manipulation of prisoner interactions and the use of strong anti-psychotic drugs to induce a state of neurochemical isolation from the outside world: 16 Isolation and sensory deprivation as it is practiced in prisons across America is a definite aspect of the oppressor’s controlled environment. Through isolation, and through the systematic removal, inclusion, or manipulation of key sensory stimuli, the government can attack a prisoner’s mind and reduce him or her to a warped subservient state characterized by feelings of lethargy, listlessness and hopelessness . . . in short, a prisoner develops the feeling of being more dead than alive. 17

The systematic attempt to annihilate the prisoner’s sense of subjectivity, agency and identity, “reducing them to broken subjects,” is the overarching aim and effect of the behavioral modification program. Shakur emphasizes that while this program is applied generally in the penal system, the leaders within the African, Hispanic, Puerto Rican and Caribbean activist movements are singled out to receive the most intense application of the program: [T]he most severe treatment [is] meted out to those with some political consciousness. They concentrate punishment on the political prisoner because the political prisoner has the clearest understanding of the prevailing exploitative relationships, and so has the greatest potential for awakening and organizing the rest of the prisoners. 18

Shakur charges that the behavior modification program constitutes a human rights violation under Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II, which Shakur quotes in its entirety, defines genocide as follows: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious

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group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group: (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 19

If Shakur’s charge of genocide were to be considered in the mode of determinative judgment, its validity rests on the link between the elimination of leadership and the subjugation of an entire race of people (Article II, section c). Severing the leadership class, through execution or imprisonment, is among the strategies employed to bring about the cultural death of a people, to destroy the bonds that hold them together as a people with a distinct identity. This falls clearly within the meaning of Lemkin’s definition in Article II. In his work on the rule of law in Nazi occupied Europe, Lemkin further clarified: Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, can be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after the removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. 20

The definition in Article II covers more than the brute physical annihilation of a people. The breadth of Article II reflects Lemkin’s concern for the cultural annihilation that was for him inseparable from the meaning of genocide: “It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture, but genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.” 21 Shakur references the definition in Article II, but almost in passing. The weight of his claim rests on the experience of prisoners under the “behavioral modification” program in an appeal to “all caring people.” 22 While the logical inference is perspicuous enough, the determinative judgment that the particular phenomena he describes fall under the definition in Article II, he does not register his appeal solely, or even principally in this mode of judgment. The details of his circumstances and the experiential unity of the image they paint bear the inferential weight of his argument. He conveys a profound sense that the logic of his argument about the wrongness of the penal system is pointless without his audience feeling the wrongness of his circumstances. The moral wrongness of genocide or the atrocities that approach this category hardly needs to be argued for; what is lacking is the motivation to intervene in a comprehensive way, to unravel the network of institutions and practices that leave the world poised to repeat the unspeakable. What is needed is a mode of political judgment that transforms sensibility, alters how we feel the world as we think about and engage it. In short, we need a mode of

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judgment that is both determinative and reflective. Shakur’s style reveals the inadequacy of determinative judgment, which on its own is as lucid as it is impotent. Without the reflective judgment that allows the concept to have an operative and vital relationship to experience, we cannot be said, really, to possess the concept or to understand the meaning of the concept “genocide.” JUDGMENT AND ACTION Shakur’s case is made without the attempt to persuade the reader to identify with his political cause or that of his fellow inmates. He is allowing the matter to speak for itself and inviting the reader to hold his experience before them. In this way, Shakur’s argumentative style exemplifies Adorno’s claim that “without recourse to the material, no ought could issue from reason.” 23 Conceptuality must maintain contact with its object, with the experience that announces the need for thought and action. Without this material, experiential element moral concepts lose their motivating force. Experiences make a moral claim that is never fully clarified, never fully discursive or transitive, and so the demand for moral certainty, for lucid determinate judgment severs us from the urgency of the moral response. When we sever determinate judgment from reflective judgment, concepts from the experiences that call for them, we stultify our capacity for moral action. When we take determinative judgment as the sole mode of judgment, the grounds for our action are displaced from the experience of the objective suffering of others to logical form and our “obligation to perform the action is transferred from the urgency of a response to rational necessity.” 24 When determinative judgment is the sole mode of judgment, moral reason “requires the repression, or at least discounting, of the original impulse to action” which is always tethered to the particular state of affairs as the locus of obligation. 25 There is, perhaps, no more emblematic case of this severance of moral concept from experiential content than the exchange between State Department spokesperson Christine Shelly and Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner during the height of the genocide in Rwanda: Elsner: How would you describe the events taking place in Rwanda Shelly: Based on the evidence we have seen from observations on the ground, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda. Elsner: What’s the difference between “acts of genocide” and “genocide”? Shelly: Well, I think the—as you know there’s a legal definition of this. . . . Clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label. . . . But as to the distinctions between the words, we’re trying to call what we have seen

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so far as best we can; and based, again, on the evidence, we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred. Elsner: How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Shelly: . . . [T]hat’s just not a question I’m in a position to answer. 26

When we read Shakur’s account of the dehumanization that takes place routinely in prisons in the United States, which leads the world in the number of persons behind bars, 27 we are hardly in a position to dismiss his accusation because the activities he describes are not sufficiently similar to some paradigm case of genocide. How many acts of dehumanization, of isolating millions from their neighborhoods and families does it take? When we hear the claim made that a given practice is genocidal we should not stand in judgment regarding whether or not the content falls under a legal definition; instead we should think how this experiential pre-conceptual unity relates to a world in which the extermination of entire populations is a proximate possibility. What is the continuity between an institution that forcibly removes millions from their homes, neighborhoods and families indefinitely and other practices that have as their goal the elimination of different peoples and the creation of a homogeneous political space? Shakur has made a compelling case for why we must raise this question. There is no finite list of experiences that dehumanize us and render our lives meaningless, irrelevant and expendable. Accordingly, there is no finite list of practices that might serve a genocidal aim. The “holding before” the reader the intransitive meaning of imprisonment, the unrelenting ways in which it turns a population of humans into administered things is the strength of Shakur’s case for the genocidal character of the prison industrial complex. NOTES 1. Matulu Shakur et al., “Genocide against the Black Nation in the U.S. Penal System” in Imprisoned Intellectuals, Joy James, ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 187–197. 2. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 5. 3. The definition is discussed in light of Shakur’s claim below. Article II defines genocide as follows: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group: (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” G.A. Res. 260 A III (December 9, 1948). 4. Throughout my discussion of determinative and reflective judgment in Adorno, I am greatly indebted to the superb treatment of this topic in J.M. Bernstein’s, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 263–329.

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5. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, James Creed Meredith, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 35, 60. See also, J.M. Berstein, Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 308. 6. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 308. 7. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 5. 8. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 311. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Bernstein. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 312. 12. Ibid. pp. 312, 313. 13. Ibid., p. 313. 14. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), pp. 82-83. 15. Shakur, “Genocide,” p. 192. 16. Ibid., p. 193. 17. Ibid., p. 195. 18. Ibid. 19. G.A. Res. 260 A III Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (December 9, 1948), quoted in Shakur, “Genocide,” p. 191. 20. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), p. 79, quoted in Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), p. 43. 21. Ibid. 22. Shakur, “Genocide,” p. 191. 23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 243. 24. Bernstein, Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 179. 25. Ibid. 26. Power, A Problem from Hell, p. 363. 27. The U.S. prison population of approximately 2.2 million is the largest in the world. National Research Council. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, (Washington, D. C.: National Academies Press, 2014). “Over 900,000 of the 2.2 million in U.S. prisons are African-American.” Marc Mauer and Ryan King, “Report of the Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Regarding Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System,” August 2013.

Conclusion Philosophy and Genocide

Philip Geurrevitch’s observation that the necessary condition for genocide is not industrial technology or organization but merely “swinging the people who swing the machetes.” 1 Adorno shows us how this swinging takes place in philosophy and culture, often centuries before the machetes have been taken up. The need to rethink history, the subject, ethics and politics in light of this problem is the driving force behind all of Adorno’s work. History is already a tissue of brutal exclusions that form the sediment beneath the flow of reason. Placing the narrative of progress in question is now a commonplace of social criticism. The social history of everyday life and institutions has created new standards for the objective study of history without the glamorous distraction of grand narratives, world-historical characters and events. Adorno has made a contribution to this endeavor, but in a way that specifically places the subject (our sense of rational, political and ethical agency) into question. Political agency is always challenged by the way in which ideology and propaganda take hold within the emotional life of the individual. Following Adorno, we might recover a meaningful sense of agency by understanding its fragility. We do not arrive at this understanding through an abstract theory of decentered subjectivity. We find it in specific instances of genocidal politics, where ideology and propaganda take hold of the most destructive capacities of the subject, warping moral sensibility and perception. This phenomenon is not limited to instances of mass killing but is coextensive with the general use of propaganda to turn the public against itself, to graft social frustration onto a vulnerable population. The study of genocide plays a role in reshaping sensibility and cultivating an awareness of the precarious situation of the individual in the contemporary world. Genocide cannot be studied seriously without affecting the disposition of the subject. We cannot study genocide with concepts unaffected by their content. The mimetic shudder we feel in studying the details of Auschwitz or Nyarubuye delivers the affective weight of the object to our subjective conceptualization of the event. These events cannot be explored without having an impact on both the character of thought and of the thinker. An abstract and emotionally distant study of genocide is certainly possible; but without a change in 127

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the character of thought, genocide studies can easily become another instrument of genocide as it supplies a litany of memorialized rallying cries and justifications for the victims to become killers themselves. Emerging theories of political judgment and action fail to take this relationship between sensibility and reason sufficiently into account. Žižek has been considered because of his apparent proximity to Adorno’s emphasis on the role of popular culture as a vehicle for the distortion of sensibility. The question is why Žižek has no hesitation in the face of the potentially genocidal scale of modern political violence. All of the suspicion and caution of the Frankfurt School is dismissed in an out-of-hand way by Žižek. In doing so, he is dismisses the historical, cultural and institutional density of the symbolic order. In Adorno’s terms, Žižek is dismissing the preponderance of the object and the objective conditions that shape subjectivity and that cannot be dismissed by dint of will. Žižek’s call for “divine” political violence couched in left-wing rhetoric would mobilize the worst tendencies of the objective order and leave the distorted sensibility of the culture industry unaltered. Like many others before him, Žižek misconstrues Adorno’s focus on the aesthetic and cultural preconditions for political judgment as political resignation. Our work in cultivating the sensibility that informs Adorno’s new moral imperative has the most profound political significance. The study of the details of genocide in all of its complexity reveals where and how our habitual ways of thinking grate against life—where reason has become the refuge of the callous bystander that can render life meaningful only by reducing it to an abstraction. Only by understanding the complicity of reason in genocide can we begin to prevent its repetition. We might say this of all the aspects of culture that have been drawn into the vortex of Auschwitz and Nyarubuye. But philosophy bears a special responsibility for attempting to assess our cultural condition as a whole and examining how it hangs together to produce a meaningful frame for human life. But it must do so by looking at the smallest things that bind particular lives together and by resisting the fate these things suffer in the face of the world-shaping forces of racism, nationalism, imperialism and other grand narratives that render particular lives insignificant and expendable. Philosophy has a responsibility to take up genocide as a central philosophical problem that places the contemporary world as a whole into question, and it must find a way of doing this through adherence to the particular. Emil Fackenheim once remarked that his only refutation of Hegel’s otherwise unassailable philosophical system was his memory of the faces of the guards at Sachsenhausen. 2 The philosophical confrontation with genocide begins with accepting the validity of that refutation.

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NOTES 1. Philip Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998), p. 95. 2. See p. 72 above.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W.: aesthetic experience, 118; Aesthetic Theory, 54n4, 107; Against Epistemology, 21n12, 40n12, 91n18; The Authoritarian Personality, 108; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4, 10–11, 11, 19, 20n1, 20n8, 23, 35, 39n7, 41n41, 43, 62, 73n31, 73n35, 78, 82, 91n15, 94, 95, 97, 107, 108, 109; and Horkheimer, Max, 1, 10; identity thinking, 3, 5, 7, 23, 34, 43–44, 45, 57, 57–58, 67, 71, 75, 86, 89, 91n18, 93, 93–94, 95, 96, 107, 119; The Jargon of Authenticity, 41n35; Minima Moralia, 9–10, 21n21, 35, 40n30, 107, 108; Negative Dialectics, 3, 21n21, 39n1, 73n25, 91n9, 91n20, 95, 99, 103n3, 103n4, 104n5, 104n19, 107; Problems of Moral Philosophy, 35, 74n56 anti-Semitism, 3, 47–48, 50, 52, 60–63, 64, 66–67, 67, 69, 70, 108, 113n3 Auschwitz, 1, 2, 3, 36, 44, 54, 62, 85, 95, 96, 101, 102, 110 Aristotle, 102–103, 120 Benhabib, Seyla, 54n2, 99, 104n22 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 76–77, 81, 81–83, 87, 90n3, 93 Bernstein, J.M., 115–116, 118, 118–119, 120 Bloch, Ernst, 76–77, 81, 90n3, 91n23, 104n18, 104n20 Brunkhorst, Hauke, 40n14 Butler, Judith, 35–37, 37–39 Cohn, Norman, 60–61, 72n20 Cook, Deborah, 54n3 Connerton, Paul, 39n7 cultural critique, 3, 107, 115

Davis, Angela, 121 democracy, 38, 86, 108–109, 109, 110, 111, 112 Der Spiegel, 107 divine violence, 38–39, 87, 87–88, 93 education, 21n12, 41n41, 96, 108, 110–111, 111, 114n14 Elsner, Alan, 124–125 enlightenment, 4, 9, 11, 12–15, 15–17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 26–27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39n7, 41n34, 65, 71–72, 75–76, 89–90 eschatology, 2, 71–72, 75–76, 77, 81–82, 83, 89, 89–90, 90n4, 94, 99, 103 Fackenheim, Emil, 57, 72n1, 92n49, 128 Foucault, Michel, 73n32 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 87–88 Friedman, George, 91n22, 100–101 Galindo, Regina Jose, 38 Gebauer, Gunter, 55n32 genocide, 2, 3, 5, 5–6, 6, 7, 19, 26, 34, 34–35 Gillan, Garth, 54n12 Goldhagen, Daniel J., 61–62, 72n18, 72n20–73n21 Gourevitch, Philip, 26–27, 70 Habermas, Jürgen, 1–2, 31, 35, 40n26, 75–76, 76–81, 81, 83, 90n3, 90n5, 91n9, 91n14, 99, 101 Hegel, G.W.F., 17, 23–24, 39n7, 57, 72n1, 84, 92n49, 94, 98, 128 Held, David, 18 historical materialism, 82, 83, 93 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 36, 62, 63, 101, 110 Höss, Rudolf, 62–63, 102 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 135

136

Index

Horkheimer, Max, 9, 10, 11, 19, 20n8, 35, 65, 79, 90n3, 99, 109, 112 Hullot-Kentnor, Robert, 20n8, 90n5 identity: and genocide, 57–70. See also Adorno, identity thinking. ideology, 34, 45–46, 46, 54, 57, 61, 70, 77, 95, 116, 127 instrumental reason, 75, 78, 79, 79–80. See also Adorno, identity thinking Jay, Martin, 7n1, 39n7, 104n21, 111 judgment: determinative, 117–119, 123, 123–124, 124; political, 1, 37, 75–76, 81, 89, 93, 101, 123, 128; reflective, 117, 118–119, 123–124 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 25, 25–26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 36, 39n5, 41n34, 41n41, 53, 62, 87–88, 101, 117, 118 King, Ryan, 126n27 Krahl, Hans Jürgen, 112–113 Lemkin, Raphael, 115, 116, 123 Lenhardt, Christian, 40n31 liberalism, 46, 65, 66, 95 Lukács, George, 78, 99 Lunn, Eugene, 92n32 Mamdani, Mahmood, 73n43 Marcuse, Herbert, 54n13, 90n3, 107, 113n2 Marx, Karl, 28, 39n7, 40n12, 81, 82, 89, 90n3, 91n22, 95, 113 Mauer, Marc, 126n27 mimesis, 44–45, 45, 48–52, 52, 53, 54n2–54n3, 55n25, 63, 66, 69, 78, 79–80, 91n15, 91n18, 98, 120–121 Müller-Doohm, 112, 113n2, 114n20

Odysseus, 18–19 political critique, 3, 107 political philosophy, 102 Power, Samantha, 126n20 Problems of Moral Philosophy. See Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy propaganda, 3, 6–7, 79; fascist, 3, 5, 35, 57, 58–60, 62, 108, 109; genocidal, 57–58; Hutu, 5, 63–64, 67–69; Nazi, 60–62; techniques of fascist agitators, 108, 109 Rose, Gillian, 40n12 Rwanda, 5, 26–27, 57–58, 63–64, 67–70, 70, 74n51, 124–125 Scholem, Gershom, 89, 90n4 Semprún, Jorge, 84, 85, 87; The Long Voyage (poem), 84 Shakur, Matulu, 115–116, 118, 122–123, 123–124, 124, 125, 125n3 Shelly, Christine, 124–125 student movement, 6–7, 19, 22n41, 99–100, 107, 111–113 subjectivity: dispossessed, 37; epistemological, 4–5, 31, 44, 63, 65; political, 6, 66, 68, 69, 70, 111 Taylor, Christopher C., 74n51 theology 6, 71–72, 82, 90n3, 93 universal and particular, 24, 25–26, 33, 35–36, 37, 46, 47, 49, 73n37, 95, 116–117 universality as moral principle, 32, 88, 95 Volkan, Vamik, 73n48

Negative Dialectics. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 29–33, 40n21, 40n26–40n30, 41n34, 87, 90n5 object, preponderance of the, 1, 21n20, 128 objective situation of the subject, 1, 13–14, 19, 28, 43–44, 84

Weber, Max, 46, 55n18, 77 Wellmer, Albrecht, 40n14, 90n1, 93, 99, 105n30 Wiggershaus, Rolf, 100 Žižek, Slavoj, 6, 38, 75–76, 83, 84–88, 93, 128 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 90n1