Abstract
This chapter retraces the development of the notion of nonidentical in Adorno’s early work. Dialectic of Enlightenment relates how enlightened reason, in its effort to overcome myth, disqualified everything that did not meet its newly enthroned criteria of verifiability, univocity, non-contradiction and, last but not least, identity. Minima Moralia explores the implications of “identity thinking” in the private sphere. This chapter examines Adorno’s claim that enlightened reason is amoral, and shows how his analysis of phenonema such as the withering of experience, the fungibility of modern man, antisemitism, and the rise of totalitarianism, relate to his notion of the nonidentical, which Adorno will develop in its full theoretical scope only in his later work.
Auschwitz confirms the philosopheme of pure identity as death.
—Adorno, Negative Dialectic
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Notes
- 1.
The German expression “Mach mal halblang” can be translated as “Give me a break”, “Cut it off”.
- 2.
In “Was heißt: Nach Auschwitz?”, in Deutsche Nachkriegsliteratur und der Holocaust (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998), 296, Burkhardt Lindner writes: “The darkness of Adorno’s philosophy, particularly in Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectic, stems not—as certain formulations seem to suggest—from a general theory of negative historical societalization, of the liquidation of the individual and the nonidentical, but from Auschwitz as the wound of his thought.” While Lindner rightly sensed the centrality of Auschwitz in Adorno’s thought, he failed to see the intimate connection between the “general theory of … the liquidation of the individual and the nonidentical” and that wound.
- 3.
Adorno, Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, in GS 5:152.
- 4.
Kant , in his Critique of Pure Reason, presents the categories of the understanding as what makes this world a world for us, rather than an unknowable thing in itself (which it also is, but that, says Kant, is perfectly irrelevant to our human experience).
- 5.
The inescapability of identity thinking and the elusiveness of the nonidentical has led some critics to discard Adorno’s point as banal. Robert Pippin writes on Adorno’s effort to salvage the nonidentical that “in practice, this seems little more than applying concepts in such a way that an asterisk is always somehow present or implied, as if to add to the invoking of a term such as ‘factory’ or ‘welfare’ or ‘husband’ or ‘statue’: Caution: Concepts just used not adequate to the sensuous particulars that might fall under them”. He calls the insight a “platitude” (Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105. Pippin accurately describes the “ethical gesture” of Negative Dialectic as “a reminder of sorts ‘to remember the forgotten nonidentical,’ a plea for finitude, humility, to acknowledge in some way what is lost in conceptual codification, to own up to nonconceptualizable sensuous particularity and something like its ethical claim on us.”, but considers the gesture “very weak” (ibid.). I hope that my reconstruction of Adorno’s thought will reveal the nonidentical as anything but a platitude, and the ethical gesture behind it as forceful and demanding.
- 6.
Adorno, “Offener Brief an Max Horkheimer”, in GS 20.1:162.
- 7.
Quoted in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927–1969. Band 1: 1927–1937 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 107–8.
- 8.
Ibid., 105.
- 9.
Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Kant, Werke, Band 9, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1957), 53.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, in Politik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Zweitausendeins, 2006), 1025.
- 12.
The problematic role played in Germany by the values of obedience and duty play a prominent role in Adorno’s critique of Kant, see Chap. 3 below.
- 13.
Adorno, Schuld und Abwehr, GS 9:217.
- 14.
Jay Bernstein analyzes this characteristic of modern reason as the “principle of immanence” in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 83–90.
- 15.
This point will be discussed further in Chap. 4.
- 16.
Even Kant’s attempt to found morality in reason relies on that fact, as the categorical imperative is not rooted in an idea of the moral good, but based on a universalization principle that has at its core the idea of a ‘workable society’.
- 17.
Heinrich Himmler to 92 leading SS officers on October 4, 1943 in Posen. Quoted in “Heinrich Himmler und die beiden Posener Reden” in Die Welt, 11.3.2007.
- 18.
In an interesting comparison of Adorno and Cavell, Martin Shuster points out a parallel between Adorno’s view of the silenced nonidentical, and Cavell’s moral perfectionism, which, in Cavell’s own words, portrays “its vision of social as well as of individual misery less in terms of poverty than in terms of imprisonment, or voicelessness.” See Shuster, “Nothing to Know. The Epistemology of Moral Perfectionism in Adorno and Cavell” in Idealistic Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, 2014, 9.
- 19.
Foster points to the affinity of Dialectic of Enlightenment’s account of the impoverishment of cognition and experience with Bergson’s reading of selective perception. In Matière et Mémoire, Bergson writes “The error [of empiricism] is not to value experience too highly, but on the contrary to substitute true experience, that which originates in the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience that is disarticulated and in consequence, no doubt, distorted.” Quoted in Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, 116.
- 20.
Letter by Adorno to Hans Paeschke (the editor of the journal Merkur), 13.2.48, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Mediennr.: HS001886845.
- 21.
Adorno gave the first draft of Negative Dialectic the title “On the Theory of Spiritual Experience”. See VND 227/183.
- 22.
Roger Foster defines spiritual experience in the following terms: “What is distinctive about spiritual experience is that the multilayered relations of a thing with other things outside it, and eventually the entirety of its context, are allowed to inform the cognitive significance of that thing.” Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, 2.
- 23.
Adorno, “Graeculus (II). Notizen zu Philosophie und Gesellschaft 1943–1969” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (München: text + kritik, 2003), 29.
- 24.
See Chap. 3 below.
- 25.
The view that the Jews owed their relative security solely to the authority of the ruling power keeping the people in check was particularly widespread in nineteenth century Austria-Hungary (see e.g. Joseph S. Bloch, Der nationale Zwist und die Juden in Österreich, Wien: M. Gottlieb, 1886). More recently, the idea has been revived by the French philosopher Jean-Claude Milner, who, borrowing the terminology of pays légal (legal country) and pays réel (real country) coined with very different intentions by Charles Maurras, the right-wing ideologist of the Action Française, depicts the history of Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century as a very tense set-up, where Jews owe their revocable liberty only to the fact that the pays légal rules against the pays réel and keeps it at bay. Every once in a while, however, the pays réél breaks through, thus laying bare the utmost fragility of the structure. The Dreyfus affair and its outbreak of popular antisemitism was for Milner one such incidence of the pays réél unleashed, with the pays légal finally taking the upper hand one last time. See Jean-Claude Milner, Le juif de savoir (Paris: Grasset, 2006). The antidemocratic undercurrent of this reading is self-evident.
- 26.
Apart from Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), accounts of ordinary coldness can be found in Ernst Klee and Willy Dressen and Volker Riess, “Schöne Zeiten”: Judenmord aus der Sicht der Täter und Gaffer (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1988).
- 27.
Hans Mayer [Jean Améry], “Zur Psychologie des deutschen Volkes” in Werke. Band 2, 507.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, 13.
- 30.
Adorno’s diagnosis of increasing fungibility in the private sphere takes on a new meaning in the age of dating apps, unfriending and cybersex.
- 31.
As Martin Shuster writes, “Adorno’s work is exactly guided by the idea that we need not wait for or wonder about some imaginary future where the human ‘vanishes’, but rather such a vanishing is happening every day under the influence of later capitalism; the ordinary just is the site of our vanishing humanity, for example in the form of the culture industry and the conformity it leaves in its wake.” Shuster, “Nothing to Know”, 8–9.
- 32.
Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, October 2, 1941, quoted in Wiggershaus, Rolf, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 309.
- 33.
For further reading, see e.g. Anson Rabinbach, “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?: The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 81, (2000), 49–64. Another informative source for Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s approach to antisemitism is Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- 34.
Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis. Kultur—Kunst—Gesellschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rororo, 1998), 435.
- 35.
Ibid., 395.
- 36.
Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, 394.
- 37.
Ibid., 397.
- 38.
Interestingly, both Jacobs and Rabinbach seem to read the Elements’ fifth thesis as an indictment of mimesis: “The major point of the fifth thesis of ‘Elements’ is that contemporary antisemitism entails, as Rabinbach has taught us, ‘the return of the archaic impulse to mimesis, which in its paranoid fear, imitates and therefore liquidates the Jews all the more consequently …’” Jack Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, 77–8. Adorno and Horkheimer, however, clearly don’t see mimesis as such as the problem, but its distortion and suppression.
- 39.
See e.g. Jonathan Judaken, “Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism: The Frankfurt School’s Anti-Antisemitism,” in Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture, ed. Phylllis Lassner and Lara Trubowitz (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 23–46.
- 40.
As Jacobs notes, “both Horkheimer and Adorno, products of a time and place, were influenced by antisemitic stereotypes”. Jacobs, The Frankfurt School, 78.
- 41.
See notably Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
- 42.
Jean Améry, “Aufklärung als Philosophia perennis” in Werke 6, Aufsätze zur Philosophie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), 549.
- 43.
Ibid., 554–5.
- 44.
Ibid., 555.
- 45.
Améry , Aufklärung als Philosophia Perennis, 555.
- 46.
“Verblendungszusammenhang” designates for Adorno the complex context of delusion perpetuated by identity thinking that turns second nature into first and makes man-made economic power structures, withered experience, unfreedom and inequality seem like the inescapable “So ist es” (“That’s the way it is”, as Adorno put it).
- 47.
Hence Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s famous claim that “Enlightement turns back into mythology”, see DA 3:16/xviii.
- 48.
Adorno, “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft” in GS 8:362–3.
- 49.
Ibid., 363.
- 50.
Améry , Aufklärung als Philosophia Perennis, 557.
- 51.
Ibid., 559.
- 52.
Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, in Werke 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002), 40 (italics J.A.).
- 53.
Améry , “Aufklärung als Philosophia Perennis”, 554.
- 54.
Améry , Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, 39.
- 55.
Ibid., 33.
- 56.
Améry , “Aufklärung als Philosophia Perennis”, 552.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid., 553. Améry borrows the term from Heinrich Mann.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Adorno, “Graeculus (II). Notizen zu Philosophie und Gesellschaft 1943–1969” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (München: text + kritik, 2003), 19.
- 62.
See PT1 82.
- 63.
Améry , “Aufklärung als Philosophia Perennis”, 555.
- 64.
Gillian Rose writes: “[The] deliberately paradoxical, polemical and fractured nature [of Adorno’s work] has made it eminently quotable but egregiously misconstruable.” Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), IX–X.
- 65.
See e.g. KRV 121/78; AES 216-7/135-6.
- 66.
Quoted in AET 7:537/361.
- 67.
Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel. “Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail” (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2015), 359.
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Silberbusch, O.C. (2018). The Fate of the Nonidentical: Auschwitz and the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In: Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95627-5_2
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