Adorno’s ‘addendum’

I Adorno’s hope

For Adorno, a social organization dominated by exchange and needless suffering is deeply limiting, but this limit may always be surpassed by some surplus or force that practically orients agents against such unfreedom. In an addendum-experience the historically developing structures of social unfreedom and constraint provide the resources for an agent to practically confront and challenge her or his world in different ways. In this way the constraint of the world is thought as also holding open the possibility of a better future. To be sure, the future thought in such a hope is not fully realizable by any isolated individual. The image of a different future recurs in each subjective addendum-experience precisely because it remains unrealized. That such a hope is never fully realizable in the world, however, does not mean that it is ahistorically or ontologically grounded, and this is central for Adorno because the hope realized in an addendum develops alongside social conditions and is articulated in an agent’s response to them. This means that enveloping social conditions condition both the kind of hope addendum-experiences offer and how this hope can be articulated, without fully determining the manner of the resistance. This is to say, the way agents can have and be moved by addendum-experiences varies over time and is conditioned by an agent’s placement in an enveloping and changing social organization.

There are two obvious pitfalls to avoid in further unpacking the hope of Adorno’s addendum. On one side analysis must first be wrested from the falsity and barrenness of a pure-conceptuality that would construe the addendum as an ideal (immaterial) source for critique. Adorno in fact uses the addendum as part of his critique of Kant and Heidegger to show how a better world must be determined via its constrained possibilities for realization in a given social and historical context rather than in a transcendental beyond or ontological ground. The notion of a different possible world materially grounded in the surplus made possible by the existing one provides resources for critique rooted in the lived, socially situated possibilities of suffering agents by revealing the fact that such agents are less free than they in fact could be. Second, and on the other side of Adorno’s rejection of a purely idealist strategy, for the addendum to open up new possibilities it cannot be entirely determined by an agent’s social horizons. As both socially grounded and pointing beyond the constraints of such a social ground, the addendum is a moment in which constraints subjectively collide in a manner that generates a force by which something new may be realized.

Adorno indeed thinks the addendum as engendering a powerful experience of immanent possibilities that are not identical to the constraint of the enveloping world. Such impulses thereby motivate action that subjectively and, to be sure, only partially reconstructs the constraint of the world. In this way, the addendum signals participation in a material dialectic that reconfigures the possibilities for further experiencing addenda and the hope they articulate by negating, even if only in limited and subjective ways, the constraints built into an agent’s relation to his or her world. Addenda thus track as well as contribute to a dynamic of hope such that capitalist domination can prove subjectively powerful in motivating challenges and possibly movements towards a different, freer social logic. Addendum-experiences have this power because they reveal the falsity of an increasingly determined world which is, in fact, never as ossified as the reified thinking it engenders is given to assume. Both for those undergoing such experiences and for the social theorist, the addendum offers the de-reified ground and possibility of intervening into it which can serve as the basis for further normative commitments.

II The addendum of Negative Dialectics

The addendum is most developed in Negative Dialectics, but it does not appear in the notes to Adorno’s lecture series translated as the Lectures on Negative Dialectics. It does, however, play a prominent role in the lecture course Adorno offered a year earlier, collected under the title History and Freedom. At the beginning of both lecture series Adorno wryly admits to mining his lectures ‘from a philosophical work in progress that I have been engaged on for years’, and that he intends to ‘make the best of this situation by…deriving a substantial part of my lectures from the copious and quite onerous book I have been working on for the last six years and which will bear the title Negative Dialectics’. ⁵ In what follows, then, an interpretation of the addendum can draw on both the published accounts of Negative Dialectics as well as the more provisional and illustrative accounts Adorno provides in lectures. As a method, problematizing conceptual autonomy by uncovering the historical sources and genesis of a thought by locating it within creative responses to the conditions of one’s labor is a fine Adornian strategy.

There are three related and equally important features of the addendum as offered in Negative Dialectics. First, Adorno works with a doubled temporal register. An addendum points both to the archaic conditions prior to the emergence of reason-guided activity, and to a possible future in which the apparent chasm between reason and nature inaugurated by reason’s domination is dissolved. Immediately following his discussion of their problematic disjunction Adorno writes that the addendum ‘is a flash of light between the poles of something long past, something grown all but unrecognizable, and that which some day might come to be’. ⁶ This doubled temporal register signals both an archaic past and the possibility of a future in which reason and nature are not opposed. In the space between the lost past and a possible future nature is not static, but undergoes its own processes of transformation as the other pole in a mediating relation with reason. As the conditioning constraint through which its rational other is actualized, nature helps determine and is rendered intelligible by reason, without ever becoming identical with or entirely reducible to it. Adorno here takes inspiration from Marx’s German Ideology in which the satisfaction and production of human needs functioned as the motor for natural history. ⁷ As both partially prior to reason and in a partial mediation with reason that retains nature’s objective irreducibility to it, an addendum provides the sign of a future where such natural-rational determination could be the basis for social organization. It does so because it unites rational with natural motivation in resisting unfree conditions and shows that action can indeed be determined in this way. This jointly determined motivation to action reveals what is nearly unrecognizable in the present: that the archaic is not and can never be lost and that a future (‘that which some day might be’) could well be organized around ratio-natural determination. In this way, the addendum’s doubled temporality requires thinking the hope it offers as simultaneously natural, historical and dynamic. In providing a jointly material and mental impulse to action the addendum’s hope can be realized not in a Messianic eschatology but in its contribution to the trajectory of natural history.

Second and stemming from the first, while also explaining its power to produce action, the experience of an addendum is a material or a somatic jolt: ‘The subject’s decisions do not roll off in a causal chain; what occurs is a jolt’ and ‘with this impulse freedom extends to the realm of experience’. ⁸ This jolt is the forcible presentation of an ineluctably physical element that subsists (in socio-historically varying and specific forms) in the will to realize freedom. In stemming from the non-identical, irreducible and socially unintegratable, an addendum-experience triggers such a powerful impulse that it cannot but prompt action. Subjects habituated to social unfreedom and domination need a jolt, a shock, or an impulse to reorient ways of relating to an enveloping world. This action is in some way ‘free’ precisely because it responds to social constraint: ‘[W]e conceive…freedom as a polemical counter-image to the suffering brought on by social coercion’. ⁹ The conceptual distinction of the material or somatic from the intra-mental or conscious which are then united in practical activity suggests that Adorno is drawing on materialist, again likely Marxian, resources for his model of historically developing unfreedom while providing an individual (rather than class-centered) account of the possibilities for challenging it. This subjective orientation will be developed more fully in what follows, but it is important to stress, first, that the embodied or somatic element of the addendum is itself subject to historical and social conditioning and, second, that this prompts a subject to realize a ground for freedom both consciously (‘a polemical counter-image’) and practically, that is, in action that articulates or is guided by the need to articulate this counter-image to social suffering. As will be shown with the example of Hamlet, however, this polemical image is not necessarily oriented towards the stable realization of freer social conditions.

Third, and in addition to the somatic, an addendum-experience is simultaneously cognitive or intra-mental. This is perhaps best conceived as the mental or conscious side of the somatic jolt, shock, or physical impulse. For if the addendum were merely material, it would be hard to conceive the action it prompts as meaningfully hopeful. Those feeling the material jolt would be little more than automata directed by physical, chemical, or electrical impulses, but this would deny the conscious mediation and self-direction which seem necessary for action to be thought free. ¹⁰ While in Adorno’s dialectic the intra-mental and the somatic are mutually and historically conditioning (an addendum is ‘intramental and somatic in one’), such co-determination does not undo the at least conceptual specificity of each pole. ¹¹ That they can be held together is not only the condition for meaningfully construing the hope for a better world by the theorist but also, when this actually happens, addendum-experiences give agents a conscious hope that a freer set of social relations is possible. Taken cumulatively, these three elements encompass Adorno’s account of the post-archaic, dynamic and historically varying possibilities for a jolt motivating actors to register and resist their unfreedom.

Against this dialectical interpretation it might be suggested that Adorno’s addendum hangs on a romantic union of what cannot be unified or problematically rests on the assumption of a merely posited and unearned organic totality. This would be comprised of a socially enveloped thinking agent on one side, her conditioning reality on the other, and some subjective, magical genius of a spark that impossibly unites what really ought to be considered two distinct sides of an incompatible whole. This, however, is not the case. There is in fact very little romantic about the rather faint hope held open in Adorno’s addendum. This is because the possibilities it highlights and the actions it prompts diverge in meaningful ways for the theorist and the agent. For the agent, hope is usually limited to momentarily realizing a possibility of freedom which is then displaced by a larger and enveloping dynamic of social constraint. For the theorist the hope can ground and orient theoretical construction of images of freer social futures and thus sustain a certain degree of theoretical optimism even when the hope of the addendum-experience itself fades. The subjective experience of such a hope is not immediately organized so as to achieve the social success it imagines, but the optimism of the theorist permits the further hope that the ‘counter-images’ articulated in action could be realized in a way that calls into being the larger social organization requisite for their actualization. ¹² Further, and this is a strength of Adorno’s commitments rather than a reason for pessimism, no such hope can exhaust itself in its full realization. Adorno’s pithy articulation in Minima Moralia: ‘the whole is the false’, articulates the ineluctable experience of the non-identical which both makes addendum-experiences possible and makes them continuously possible. ¹³ For this reason a hope can never be guaranteed or broadened into a utopian dream of seamless social integration. The addendum would lose its requisite material mooring when so broadened, and a guarantee would undo its status as underdetermined and socio-historically conditioned and conditioning. This means that the always possible hope of a social agent is likely to be disappointed while the frustrated but ineluctable optimism of the social theorist is secured by recognizing that even disappointments condition further possible addendum-experiences. Put simply, this means that our counter-images are inexhaustible.

It may be objected, however, that if the two-sidedness of an agent and her world is not sundered in a wholly tragic conception of absolute incompatibility, or dissolved in either an absolute idealism or absolute social domination, there nonetheless is something of a romantic edge to Adorno’s position here. Still, Adorno’s addendum does not promise a union so much as describe what is perhaps best conceived as the frictional coordination of a resisting agent in the midst of a world in which both agent and world are mutually conditioning such that the possible freedom of the former to act in the latter subjectively – and in a manner open to negotiation – marks the division between the two. ¹⁴ In this way, an addendum triggers a subjective experience of resistance pointing to the possibility of a better world, a possibility which is itself constrained by how social organization conditions the expression of such resistance. This constraint is especially forceful when resistance is, as we shall see, developed by merely individual and isolated subjects. While insufficient on its own, the subjective jolt of an addendum-experience can start a process of resistance and imbue it with the kind of hope that seems valuable and necessary for more than merely subjective and fleeting orientations towards freedom.

III The addendum of Adorno’s lectures: Two examples

With these elements in hand we are now in a position to supplement the foregoing considerations with the two illustrations Adorno developed in his History and Freedom lectures: Buridan’s ass and Shakespeare’s passive and reflectively sequestered Hamlet. Both function as extremes illustrating particular parts of what Adorno was committed to in the addendum while each also, implicitly, warns against taking either illustration in isolation as exhaustive of his meaning. While many recognize that this is the case with Buridan’s ass, the Hamlet example is frequently read as if it were alone a straightforward articulation of Adorno’s position. Buridan’s ass starving to death without a material impulse prompting a decision to eat is clearly counter-factual, for none but a human animal under capitalism would actually starve to death in general conditions of plenty. This illustration then highlights the somatic or material-impulse side of the addendum, and how a somatic jolt is necessary to prompt action:

…[what] is elided in the intellectualist conception of the will…is what I call the ‘additional factor’ [das Hinzutretende]. The decisions of the human subject do not simply glide along the surface of the chain of cause and effect. When we speak of acts of will, we experience a sort of jolt. The most basic example of this, the story of Buridan’s ass, does in fact give us an inkling of this when we consider that even the ass, stupid though it may be, still has to exert itself, to make a gesture of some sort, to do something or other that goes beyond the thought-processes or non-thought-processes of its pathetic brain. That is to say it experiences some kind of impulse, I would almost say a physical impulse, a somatic impulse that goes beyond the pure intellectualization of what is supposed…alone to constitute the will. ¹⁵

The conscious or intra-mental side of the addendum is equally stressed in the lectures. Adorno describes the addendum as a socially mediated but preserved impulse joined with consciousness. Following Adorno’s account of the archaic, if the impulse was originally ‘a kind of reflex’, then ‘in that case, it was only through the participation of consciousness in actions that were originally blind and reflexive in nature that this additional factor that I regard as a constitutive element of the will came into being’. ¹⁶ The prehistorical or archaic element retains its force today not as it did prehistorically, but as it is filtered through the historically and social conditioning of consciousness and the actions it contributes to. Adorno has in mind this conscious component of the dialectic when he insists that ‘it is possible…for something age-old to survive and nevertheless to become radically different from what it originally was’. ¹⁷ For this reason accounts of the addendum that see it as the basis of a general Adornian theory of action are partially correct, but miss how changing relations to nature historically determine the form in which addenda become possible. Such accounts thus miss the critical component of conscious agency as resistance to an enveloping social logic, while accounts that read the addendum as merely a return to the archaic are even more deeply flawed. ¹⁸ A more appropriate reading would then enrich the theory-of-action account by showing that addenda orient agents to interventions against historically ossified, unfree social conditions. Such interventions articulate hopes insofar as they recognize the mutability of their world and, whether successful or not, try to extend this mutability practically.

To move to the second example and contra Buridan’s ass: the capitalist world of plenty, manufactured scarcity and thus needless suffering does not permit a simple impulse to action to satisfy historically produced human needs. The Buridan’s ass example does not, in other words, do justice to the social and historical development of consciousness in relation to scarcity and contemporary constraint on freedom. In choosing an ass Adorno made transparent what this particular example left behind. For illustration beyond this archaic side we can turn to his handling of Hamlet. While articulated only at the very dawn of the bourgeois era, Hamlet’s isolation and closed-off reflectiveness are presented as a kind of ideal type for socially and historically conditioned (modern if not contemporary western), curiously ineffective agents. In response to recognizing the rottenness of the world, Hamlet isolates himself from it. ¹⁹ For Adorno, Hamlet’s problem directly mirrors Hegel’s criticism of stoicism:

As a knowing, rational being, the conscious human subject withdraws his actions from the realm of the irrational, corrupt, bad reality confronting him – but it also means that the entire relation of the individual to this reality becomes problematic. Wherever the subject wishes to move to action, he finds himself in the grip of a horror vacui, unsure about how he will ever succeed in emerging from his own rationality so as to transform into reality what he has perceived to be rational. ²⁰

In further unpacking Adorno’s Hamlet particular care is required for two reasons. First, Hamlet’s isolation is so extreme and pathological that it cannot function as a model for the typical agent’s experience. Hamlet’s isolation illustrates a logical extreme, but in doing so it denies the deep social determination that bourgeois agents undergo in relating to their world. Second, and because the example offers such an extreme case, the kind of action Hamlet’s jolt prompts leaves no room for a reconfigured future. In this way Hamlet’s experience is the other side of Buridan’s ass’ in that the self-destructive (because missing) impulse to action for the ass, while present for Hamlet, occasions a no less self-destructive result. Hamlet’s jolt produces a deeply counter-productive and merely destructive set of actions that denies the hope thought in the addendum. Adorno then is indeed highlighting aspects of the addendum, but is characteristically proceeding negatively: he uses each illustration to clarify one necessary but insufficient side of his commitments. In doing so Adorno also highlights the essential limits of each example’s one-sidedness. The ass illustrates the necessity of brute somatic impulse as well as the inappropriateness of reducing the historical dynamic of human action to an unmediated archaic animality. Hamlet illustrates the necessity of socially mediated intra-mental impulse by highlighting the danger of addendum-induced action when it is occasioned in an absolutely isolated consciousness. Put rather simply, the ass negatively reveals the need for history while Hamlet negatively reveals the need for social determination. Hamlet and the ass, now taken together, show the necessity of conceiving the addendum as providing an intramental and somatic impulse which must be understood as historically and socially conditioned so as to articulate the minimal yet ineliminable hope which we have seen is central for Adorno.

I will now say a little more about the risk of addendum-experiences in light of the grotesque violence in Hamlet. Hamlet’s experience of a jolt signals the possibility of absolute destruction and thus a terrifying and destructive rather than a freedom-affirming challenge to the world. At their best, addendum-experiences can move thought and action to freer futures, but Adorno uses Hamlet to highlight a serious danger and the fact that such hoped-for results are far from guaranteed. ²⁴ Hamlet’s impulse to merely destructive violence is due to the extreme isolation of his mental side: ‘for Hamlet to be able to put into practice the moral and political ideas he has formed, he must perforce regress; he must return to an earlier, archaic stage – the stage of immediate expression’, and, more generally, the ‘very development of consciousness effectively ensures that freedom is pushed back into the realm of archaic, mimetic impulses that is so essential to it’. ²⁵ By thoroughly isolating the intra-mental Hamlet’s addendum-experience bypassed social mediation and signified a regression below or behind the possibilities for articulating a freer world. Adorno seems to be saying that the jolt of an addendum can indeed elicit immediate, destructive expression, but this kind of action is determined by the state of the moral and political ideas of the agent and the deeply conditioning nature of his location in and relations to his world. This danger, like the hope, is ineliminable because no addendum-experience of necessity prompts or shows the superior value of any particular possible world. An addendum-experience prompts resistance but leaves its direction under-determined.

This is an important point as Adorno is using Hamlet to illustrate not the best possibilities of an addendum-experience, but their worst. In suggesting via Hamlet that an addendum-experience can impel agents to a regression behind historically and socially conditioned possibilities, Adorno is honest to the social conditioning of action stemming from an addendum as well as the fact that such conditioning never constitutes full determination. ²⁶ The intra-mental component of the jolt then provides a forceful de-stabilization of how an agent relates to a world while the action that results from the jolt can be realized in a variety of more or less destabilizing challenges to it. While the direction of this destabilization is under-determined, even Hamlet’s shedding of the quietistic nullity of introspection in a regression to anti-social and useless violence signifies the mutability of what had become his deeply ossified relation to the world. This experience of mutability gives the lie to reified consciousness, and is the source for both the agent’s and the theorist’s hope that another world is indeed possible. This simultaneously bodily and mental experience of challenging a reified world is a necessary, even if insufficient and indeed risky, way to begin producing a freer one. For that reason, however, it is more than a part of Adorno’s philosophy of action, moral psychology, or social critique. While it contains elements of each of these, Adorno’s addendum is unified as the hope that constrained subjects may realize undisclosed possibilities of their greater social freedom in the midst of unfree social conditions. Only by being fully immersed in and then confronting constraining social structures can an agent both realize that his world is socially constituted and thus mutable, as well as begin to organize and direct resistance in less risky ways. Such resistance may itself, first, further clarify the nature of the confronted world and, second, create greater possibilities for challenging it. Newly achieved intra-mental orientations and crucially, their social conditioning, are thus part of the somatic, social and historical story Adorno develops to explain the subjective experience of hope for a freer world as well as elements of a justified, though minimal, optimism for theoretical reflection on such a world.

IV Freedom’s absence and social possibility: Beyond aesthetic, ideal, affect-centered and Freudian interpretations

Before exploring the limits of other possible interpretations, let me summarize the results already on the table. Despite Adorno’s deeply pessimistic social analysis, the suffering of unfreedom is not ‘a fatality that one should accept; it is’, rather, for Adorno, ‘a fatality which resistance must clarify’. ²⁷ In offering an avenue of resistance to the suffering of unfreedom, the impulse engendered by an addendum-experience clarifies elements of an agent’s enveloping social and historical constraint by confronting them. Determined in such a way, the addendum serves in part as Adorno’s theoretical rejoinder to existential, ontological, transcendental, ideal, or any other ahistorical conceptualization of social suffering and the possible responses to it. ²⁸ Further, the addendum can be used to chart the dynamic of socio-historical mutable, intra-mental and somatic determination of the responses an agent can have to her or his social constraint and suffering. The historical dynamic of these determinants is teleologically oriented neither to a glorious present nor a guaranteed future utopia while it is also, crucially, not simply charting a downward, regressive spiral. The addendum is best understood as an impulse to resistance occasioned by a surplus – the additional factor – in a subject’s relation to the objective world. This surplus problematizes (in socially conditioned ways) the present relations, structures and dynamics responsible for the suffering caused by an unfree social order. As I have suggested, appreciating all these registers as integrated in the notion of the addendum is best accomplished when a materialist and dialectical frame of analysis is used to interpret Adorno’s rich commitments. ²⁹ In what follows, then, I will show how other frames of analysis, namely aesthetic, ideal, affect-centered and Freudian accounts (which have dominated largely to the exclusion of non-reductive material and dialectical analyses), provide at best only partial insight into how Adorno thinks and weaves together these multiple registers and commitments.

The frame of analysis nearest to the one offered here tends to read the addendum within the purview of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Such an approach retains a certain union of the material and intra-mental registers, and it is indeed profitable to conceive Adorno’s overall strategy as generally aesthetic, even down to his notoriously difficult style. Still, the addendum is related but never entirely reduced to the possibilities Adorno identifies in works of art. ³⁰ The material element of the addendum is not exclusively a human product, but is rather developed along the lines of a natural force – with the caveat that this force is part of his dialectical understanding of ‘natural history’. ³¹ Further, the productive moment of an addendum comes, as the Hamlet example illustrates, from a subject’s impulse to action filtered through his or her socially situated possibilities, not from the material presentation of an ideal of particularity that, as a sign or promissory note, might then provide a utopian orientation for practice. ³² Although some modernist works of art provide instances of aesthetic particularity and, in so doing, offer the basis for a possible change in value-orienting ideals, this reorientation is generally accomplished by an intentional construction of the work. The artwork is a mimetic articulation that represents or reflects on the emaciated nature of modern experience. The experience of an addendum, on the other hand, is a jolt, a shock, or an impulse that dissolves this space of aesthetic production and reception in a quickened instant. So while some works of art may produce addenda, not all do, and not all addenda stem from the aesthetic experience engendered by an artist’s objectifications. Further, whether from aesthetic or other forms, an addendum-experience is a sudden force that prompts resistance to constraint, the form of which is under-determined and, as Hamlet illustrates, open to the possibility of regression. In contrast, modernist works of art operate by transparently articulating the principle of non-identity and thereby provide greater guidance for the resistance they motivate. While a valuable sub-species of the addendum, the aesthetic is thus narrower in scope, more mediated in its production and reception, less immediately linked to action, and more determinate in the orienting power it may indeed have than Adorno thinks in the broader category of the addendum and addendum-experiences.

Eckart Goebel has offered a more specific version of the aesthetic frame in suggesting that the productive imagination in Kant provides a strong link between Adorno’s addendum and his aesthetics. ³³ The experience of a ‘shudder’ analysed in Adorno’s aesthetic theory does indeed sound like a kind of impulse. Adorno describes modern shudderings as ‘afterimages of the primordial shudder’ or as a new ‘comportment reacting mimetically to abstractness’, yet precisely here a strong contrast to an addendum can be drawn. ³⁴ As has been shown with the limits of both Buridan’s ass and Hamlet, addenda-experiences are far from mimetic presentations of either archaic origins or of bourgeois society’s production of socially isolated consciousness. They provide a visceral, concrete and powerful experience of the non-identical in the midst of a totalizing social order and thereby produce a kind of resistance to the contours of the present that is not necessarily guided by any progressive or revolutionary principles. In addition to these differences from his aesthetic theory the addendum cannot, as Goebel has it, be thought along the line of Kant’s productive imagination for, if it were, it would be caught up in the synthesis that bridges sensibility and judgement. But for Adorno the addendum is meant to show that precisely just such a bridge is not in fact necessary. A bridge between the two is necessary only if the Kantian distinction between things in themselves and our manner of access to them is accepted. In addition to his arguments against ahistorical and purportedly pure freedom, Adorno rejects the Kantian presuppositions that necessitate this bridging when he thinks the addendum as intra-mental and somatic at the same time. For Adorno, the thought that such a bridge is needed is itself a response to the social conditions of unfreedom, that is, a response to what addenda can point beyond and clarify in the resistance they occasion.

Unlike Goebel’s aesthetic strategy, another promising but only partially helpful way to appreciate the work done by Adorno’s addendum is to situate it as a critical response to Kant and then draw on Adorno’s deep debt to Hegel to further highlight this divergence. As we have seen, Adorno indeed accepts Hegel’s phenomenological diagnosis of the motives and structures of stoicism and applies it to Kant’s idealism. He also goes another step down the Hegelian path and thinks the material force of the stoic position for socially situated agents. By reinscribing Adorno’s addendum within Kant’s critical project Goebel, despite an accurate depiction of Adorno’s critique of Kant’s practical philosophy, misses how Adorno undermines not only Kant’s but equally Hegel’s ideal grounds of freedom. Neither reason’s purity and universality in a subject, nor a socially situated subject’s self-consciousness, suffice for the possibility of free agency: both require an appraisal of the material realities of unfreedom and the additional element or addendum that moves an agent beyond the impotence of self-consciousness. If for Adorno the ‘whole is the false’, then the addendum underwrites his rejection of a Hegelian identity and reconciliation of subject and object in self-consciousness. ³⁵ For this reason addendum-experiences not only open up possibilities for challenging the relationships that usually bind an agent within the horizons of his or her social organization, but can also prove efficacious in orienting an agent by the possibilities that were clarified in just this unbinding. In this way it is much more likely the case that Adorno is inspired by Marx’s materialism rather than Hegel’s absolute idealist response to Kant’s other-worldly freedom. A change in relation to suffering is caused and realized not in the developing arc of socially mediated self-consciousness and its evolving patterns of recognition, but in the ways action and its results continuously reconfigure the way we relate to and produce our natural history.

In the opposite direction, Alastair Morgan’s account of the addendum describes it primarily as an affective experience of happiness or suffering. ³⁶ Morgan holds that suffering is a metaphysical experience that links the very-nearly-lost with a yet-to-come future. While his attention to the dual temporality of lost-past and possible-future is a valuable interpretive approach, Morgan’s description of the experience that prompts this dual temporal relation is quite opposed to Adorno’s. Morgan insists that ‘the paradigmatic experience [of the addendum]…for Adorno, is happiness’, which, as an unfulfilled experience, opens new possibilities. ³⁷ Whatever else one might say regarding the promise of happiness as a ground for confronting suffering, for Adorno, happiness is legitimately possible only via a recognition of non-identity, that is, ‘where the self is not itself’. ³⁸ Unrealized happiness then lacks the objective non-identical ground Adorno requires. Morgan also problematically develops the not-entirely-lost past by way of anamnetic recollection. Invoking Plato, Morgan holds that ‘the concept of anamnesis suggests that such an untamed impulse resides somewhere within the subject unchanged by history’. ³⁹ Yet, at another moment, Morgan reverses course and suggest the opposite, namely that ‘the somatic impulse…is always mediated by…its incarnation in a social and historical milieu’. ⁴⁰ Finally, in a move that risks rejecting the earlier stance on happiness, Morgan suggests that the addendum is ‘exemplified in experiences and responses to suffering life’. ⁴¹ This ‘exemplification’ muddies whether affective responses are causes, descriptions, or results of the addendum-experience. More appropriately, Adorno’s addendum points to a mixed intra-mental and somatic, historically determined experience, one valuable upshot of which is that its practical results show that the affect of suffering need not in fact be taken as a permanent feature of one’s relationship to the non-identical. Affect also historically develops and is subject to challenge in different ways. The affect of suffering and the many possible addenda-induced and affectively charged responses to it have somatic, conscious and socio-historical grounds none of which, for Adorno, are the subject’s experience of incomplete happiness. While granting the productivity of affect in both its happy and suffering registers, it remains unclear how Morgan’s affective lenses might add up to an internally consistent and compelling account of the addendum.

To supplement a suffering-centered account one might be tempted to add a psychoanalytic story such that an addendum’s force is explained as a return of the socio-historically repressed – the ‘archaic’ as Adorno has it on such readings. In this way addendum-experiences would engender behavior that reveals or tracks seemingly foreclosed avenues for drive satisfaction or, in a different way, achieves sublimated realization. Taking the first possibility, when social pressures and integration are unactionable, as Hamlet evidences, the risk that the results of an addendum are counterproductive and violent grow. On this account Hamlet’s asocial pathology erupts in an irrational will to violence, and the work rapidly devolves into a grotesque catastrophe of mass murder. Joel Whitebook develops a version of this psychoanalytic interpretive lens as an aid in his interpretation of the addendum. ⁴² He recognizes how the addendum functions as an anti-metaphysical centerpiece of Adorno’s critique of Kant, but then oddly reinscribes Adorno’s thinking within the same problematic: ‘the addendum is simply the necessary reintroduction of “that which was eliminated” from the Kantian’ position. ⁴³ If Adorno was to avoid this blunder, Whitebook suggests that he ought not to have overlooked the theoretical power of sublimation as a coping strategy which can successfully integrate constrained subjects and their social world. To be sure, Freudian sublimation may be a valuable vehicle for unpacking opportunities for agency in the midst of an unfree world, and the ‘suppression’ Adorno points to may, on its face, suggest the applicability of a sublimative reading. Yet sublimation and addenda in fact articulate directly opposed strategies of responding to social constraint. Whereas sublimation renegotiates cathexes, experiences of addenda do not, as we have seen, stem from or attempt such renegotiation. Adorno’s refusal of a sublimative strategy also articulates the hidden power of non-identity. The inability to happily integrate the constraints of the world, and the concomitant suffering thereby produced, can at times elicit a direct confrontation to such constraining structures. Effective sublimation would cut off the addendum’s radical potential before it has a chance to prompt resistance. Adorno’s goal is not to shoe-horn subjects into the constraining logic of exchange and then make suffering palatable with marginal releases, but to think relations and experiences that would prompt recognition of and challenges to the logic of such a prison.

For this reason, most interpretations that, like Whitebook’s, recuperate a psychoanalytic lens tend inappropriately to merge a few different categories of analysis and, in so doing, develop an interpretation of the addendum that is largely orthogonal to Adorno’s aims. If an experience of an addendum is akin to a jolt or a flash, then it is better read as bypassing or cutting through the sources and potentials of sublimation. For Whitebook, however, the addendum is a ‘frontier-entity on the border between the mental and the physical’, and on this model sublimation is necessary ‘to transform the flash of light into the steady illumination of a theory’. ⁴⁴ Yet since an addendum-experience is intra-mental and somatic at the same time, it is not thinkable via the analogy of border or frontier that separates two distinct realms, least of all one that results in the discursivity necessary to illuminate a theory. Without the respective two-sidedness of a border, the concept of sublimation loses its explanatory function as a kind of intra-mental phase-shift. ⁴⁵ Rather than straddle what remains distinct, an addendum-experience complicates the distinction by tying the two together and serves as the empirical basis of a theoretical hope which, as I have suggested, is far less than a fully illuminated theory.

For precisely this reason J. M. Bernstein is correct in warning against Freudian strategies of interpreting Adorno. Bernstein reminds us that

Adorno is not unaware of the alternative and more ameliorating strategies in…Freud. But he cannot see those strategies as other than ameliorating, as attempting to revoke the extremes which the Cartesian and Kantian philosophies have already lodged; and to the extent to which they propose a theory of the unity of mind and nature, they leap over the disenchanted and dualist disposition of pre-theoretical thought and practice. ⁴⁶

Conclusion

Since current social organization is dominated by capital and its universalization of the principle of exchange, social life diminishes freedom and increases suffering beyond what is in fact necessary. In his Hamlet example, Adorno adopts a Marxian thought and suggests that social constraint produces a tendency to over-develop and privilege the abstract and ideal. In part for this reason Adorno is not convinced that the likely addenda of today enlarge the possibilities of non-regressive jolts or that they cumulatively add up to the social organization of effective resistance. While Adorno has no method or doctrinal suggestions for orienting radical action, he insists that the regressive risks he highlights in the addendum nonetheless hold a radical promise. This promise is voiced, even if faintly, every time one experiences the hope imbedded in a constraining social logic which can never exhaust its power to produce resistance. In order to improve the chances of successful resistance, such hope must be – contra Hamlet –socially mediated and consciously informed by the possibilities for a freer social logic. But in moving beyond such requirements social theory would verge into social prescription, and Adorno is reticent to travel in such waters. If, despite the historical horror Adorno thinks in response to, and the horrors which form the social backdrop of thinking today, it is still possible to be impelled by one’s relation to an unfree and suffering world so as to challenge it, then such interventions must be both theoretical which is to say, intra-mental, and also material, embodied, or somatic.

Yet, the faintness of Adorno’s hope should also be stressed. Challenge to social organization is rare given the growing technical ability to manage and produce experiences as well as to safely divert or sublimate drives. In such a social organization addenda will be infrequent, and it would be impossible to try to plan or produce them. This seeming limitation, however, is a too often neglected strength of Adorno’s theory. The addendum describes how an agent’s relation to an increasingly constraining world can in fact point beyond its supposedly fixed boundaries. An addendum-experience provides an intimation of possibilities and thus a hope in what may otherwise seem immutably bleak. This is neither a utopian ideal nor a revival of the romantic dream of resolving mutually incompatible oppositions in a harmonious totality. It is Adorno’s recognition, first, of the historical and thus mutable production of the jointly bodily and mental as mutually conditioned by and contributing to a frictionally developing whole in which something more, an additional factor is always possible. Second, Adorno recognizes that this something more provides an impetus to respond to constraint and suffering in a way that offers hope for a freer world. At their best, however, addenda can highlight how consciousness and material existence might be co-determining in a freer social organization by showing the causes of their separation and isolation in an agent’s suffering. Rather than an explicit recipe or even a necessary principle for resistance, the addendum shows resistance is always possible. It therefore provides an ineluctable glimmer of hope for theory which insists on placing suffering at its center.