Conditioning Adorno: “After Auschwitz” Now

Abstract

Already when Espen Hammer opened this conference two days ago, we agreed in advance about the fittingness of our meeting this morning on Adorno’s hundredth birthday.¹ But if a shared concern for a certain “truth” and a certain “promise” has led us, over whatever paths, to become readers and students of the Frankfurt critical theorist, that same concern enjoins us to remember that September 11 also marks the destruction of democracy and the plunge into terror in Chile, in 1973. The rightwing coup d’état that murdered Salvador Allende and obliterated his elected government was, let’s remember, covertly supported and probably triggered by the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, namely ITT. And of course this day, September 11, marks that more recent traumatic hit two years ago, which provided the pretext for a perpetual preemptive so-called war on terror—a war that has already rained bombs on the people of two countries and blasted away at international law and human rights. We’ll see if this war recoils, before it’s over, on the dominant neoliberal world order. I begin in this way in order to underscore how premature pronouncements of the end of history, so comforting to the right wing a decade ago, have turned out to be. Indeed as we are convened here, people who evidently have not heard that history is over are engaged in disrupting the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun.

That fascism lives on, that the oft-invoked working through of the past [Aufarbeitug der Vergangenheit] has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting, is due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist. Fascism essentially cannot be derived from subjective dispositions. The economic order, and to a great extent the economic organization modeled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains them in a state of political immaturity [Unmündigkeit]. If they want to live, then no other avenue remains but to adapt, submit themselves to the given conditions; they must negate precisely that autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals; they can preserve themselves only if they renounce their self. To see through the nexus of deception, they would need to make precisely that painful intellectual effort that the organization of everyday life, and not least of all a culture industry inflated to the point of totality, prevents.

—Theodor W. Adorno ( WTP, 139/98–9)