Difference without fear: Adorno contra liberalism

I

There are a number of persistent certitudes surrounding Theodor Adorno’s social theory. On the one hand, Adorno rigorously unpacks the ways that well-designed political orders damage those who live within them – and thereby exhibits a committed ethical sensibility. On the other hand, there is wide consensus that this gesture is undermined by his account of how these systems reproduce themselves. Not only does the need-manipulation characteristic of late capitalism prevent agents from recognizing their suffering, but its deformed resources for thought and communication systematically erode their capacity to conceptualize alternatives. Reason itself has become a tool of domination, foreclosing the promise of the Enlightenment. And from these premises, the reception of Adorno has long hinged upon a central reservation: as rich as his diagnosis of modernity may be, he nonetheless turns his back on political life, in favour of an arational, pessimistic withdrawal into the domain of aesthetic theory.

This reading has a long pedigree – and is perhaps best represented in Jürgen Habermas’s effort to redeem critical theory from the ‘dead end’ of the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s legacy, we are told, is a withering negativism, in which nothing can be predicated of a better state, and the theorist is left to unpack forms of social damage, signalled at the scarcely articulable modality of suffering. ¹ Or, to close with the evocative formula offered by György Lukács, Adorno’s resignative tendencies ultimately lead him to flee the unruly noise and possibilities of the agora, in order to check into ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’. ² While this narrative has the benefit of popularity, it has the unfortunate liability of being incorrect when taken in these uncompromising terms. As more sympathetic readers (Bernstein, Sherratt) have argued, for instance, this standard reading could be pressured on grounds that the aesthetic engagements of Adorno’s late philosophy nonetheless represent a coherent practical vision – one that offers a different form of relationship, founded within a different practice of reason (rather than a flat disavowal of these substantive normative terms). ³ And thus, this apparent ‘aesthetic turn’ is not a withdrawal from practical concerns, so much as an effort to provide the normative resources (presently unavailable or threatened) under which the moral aims of the rationalist tradition could be realized. Some of these considerations will be addressed in the final section below. At present, however, I am rather more interested in the scattered allusions that Adorno does offer for critical practice – as oblique and veiled as they might be.

Perhaps the clearest such moment comes in Minima Moralia, where Adorno poses a challenge to the normative groundwork of liberal polities. In a loose series of associations, he proposes that liberal commitments to equality find their ultimate expression within totalitarian efforts to make agents equivalent – whether through the psychological machinations of the culture industry (in which our tastes and aspirations are standardized through media technologies) or the dehumanizing conditions of the concentration camps (in which agents are reduced to bare flesh, distinguished only by the numbers they came to bear). Or, to bring out the common thread linking these cases, the pathological dynamics of late modern societies convert the normative impetus towards equality into a qualitative standardization of human life. From the things we want to the ways we act, we are made ever more the same. The justification for this charge will be treated at a later point. Of more interest for current purposes is the posed alternative:

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. Politics that are still seriously concerned with such a society ought not, therefore, propound the abstract equality of men even as an idea. Instead, they should point to the bad equality today, the identity of those with interests in films and in weapons, and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. ⁴

The puritanical degree to which Adorno observes the Marxian Bilderverbot prevents any direct approach to these images of utopia. An oblique access will be rendered possible, however, by placing these issues on a broader normative stage. For, if a ‘difference without fear’ represents his notoriously elusive alternative to the damaged societies of late modernity, then the central question must be just how it differs from the liberal models he explicitly aims to contest. By placing such weight upon the utopian possibilities of difference and diversity, it may seem that we sidestep the stultifying thesis of negativism only to arrive at an Adorno whose social vision is indistinguishable from standard liberal commitments to tolerate those whose lives, beliefs or desires fall outside the range that determines what is ‘normal’ or acceptably ‘one of us’. To gain clarity on such questions, the article will move in two, distinct steps. First, I elaborate how Adorno does not simply depart from the conceptual world of liberalism, but rather (from this vantage point) places pressure upon its central methodological commitments. The second half of the article will use this alternative normative framework to press some claims regarding the specific good in question – not only what the pathologies of difference are meant to be (in excess of familiar liberal construals), but how Adorno’s intervention might contribute to contemporary reflections upon heterogeneity and its political meaning.

II

To address this complex of issues, it will be useful to begin with the model that has dominated liberal engagements with difference. There are any number of precedents within this rich political tradition, though the key point is located in a well-known Rawlsian formula: a de facto situation of pluralism demands that we resist substantive judgements regarding the goodness of social forms; rather, the task is to privilege the right, so as to set the terms by which agents, divided over the ends of human life, can pursue their distinct visions of the good. And, with this move, the liberal position stakes its claim upon both normative and realist grounds. At the very least, it can be seen as a tonic for hard times – a modus vivendi to prevent this value-pluralism from erupting into minoritarian suppression or inter-group conflict. A stronger formulation would propose that this austerity offers the space necessary to balance private moral choice – and thus a normatively rich commitment to personal autonomy, rather than a best-case compromise. ⁶

It would not take great interpretive feats to recognize Adorno’s distance from this kind of evaluative restraint – given exemplary form in his charge that late industrial societies are ‘damaged’ or ‘pathological’ or ‘false’. ⁷ And this critical language is surely not new within left-Hegelian conversations. The tradition of Ideologiekritik, for instance, would maintain that the transformative potentials of class tension have stalled due to a systematically falsified grasp on the forces that bind and mobilize social life. For, if emancipatory praxis demands rational insight into the operation of social institutions and how they contribute to (or undermine) our normative commitments, this is precisely the knowledge meant to be blocked by hegemonic social narratives. Class interests are instead presented as group-neutral forms of cooperation, and contingent practices construed as immutable (and thus non-contestable) social facts. ⁸ A different path comes from the psychoanalytic engagements of the Frankfurt School – though here, the problematic of falsity means to characterize the structures of subject formation within late industrial societies. ⁹ That is, a social life shot through with exploitation, aggression and xenophobia can be sustained only by means of a systematic deformation of our need-interpretations, such that agents privilege ‘false needs’ (i.e. self-undermining desires) over those that would meet their genuine interests. ¹⁰

Although both strains can be found within Adorno’s work, the specificity of his argument forces us to read these charges against the background of liberal social ontology. Characteristically, the grounds for privileging the right over the good come from a social ontology where individuals, divided by tastes and values, are the first premise for moral argumentation – in which case, the essential political task is to coordinate their competing projects on terms that could meet with their reflective assent. ¹¹ It is within this set of premises that Adorno’s thin appeal to falsity (one that will need to be thickened and complicated) might first be rooted:

… the fictitious claim is made that what is biologically one must logically precede the social whole, from which it is only isolated by force, and its contingency is held up as a standard of truth. Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense. All its content comes from society, or at any rate from its relation to the object. ¹²

If this were all the charge of falsity entailed, it could be read as an arch-Hegelian corrective to an impoverished phenomenology of selfhood. That is, these interpretively-rich roles and practices offer a second nature that is constitutive of the kind of subjects that we might become, and thus represent the unchosen ground on the basis of which individuals take up meaningful postures in social space. To render the charge in less sectarian terms: the performance of individuality rests upon conditions that cannot be reconciled with the kind of agent presumed by liberal social ontology (i.e. one that autonomously sifts through its value commitments as matters of private belief or preferences). ¹⁵ A sharper normative framework is suggested, however, by the subtitle of Minima Moralia, which proposes a set of ‘reflections from damaged life’ (Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben). At stake is not simply the meta-theoretical question of how personhood is conceptualized; rather, the basic form of social life, and the relational web that binds lives and bodies, is itself presented as damaged, pathological or mutilated. It is this stronger formulation that troubles any easy constructivist-communitarian reading. For, if we might surely concede that social roles (and the relational forms they render possible) are interpretively thick and collectively sustained, this thin rendering does not offer resources to justify a) how any such practices could be seen as false or wrong in substantive terms, or b) how this damage would prevent the practice of a ‘right’ life, as suggested in Adorno’s well-known insistence that ‘no right life is possible within the false’ (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen). ¹⁶

To better reflect this charge of unavailability, it is necessary to introduce a corollary that Axel Honneth has placed at the heart of left-Hegelian social theory: not only does the performance of identity depend upon social conditions of meaning, but any distortion of these conditions generates pathological forms of self- and other-relation. ¹⁷ In minimalist terms, then, Adorno’s charge could be described as an elaboration upon this thesis, under conditions that systematically distort core normative goods. From this vantage point, the competitive, indifferent individualism of liberal thought takes on an importantly different character; it cannot be reduced to a descriptive error, but rather (to invoke the terms of Ideologiekritik) presents a true rendering of a ‘false’ state of affairs. As Adorno proposes:

For the so-called man of affairs … the people he comes into contact with are metamorphosed automatically into friends or enemies. In looking at them with a view to deciding how well they fit in with his intentions, he reduces them from the outset to objects: some are usable, others an obstacle. … Thus impoverishment of the relation to others sets in: the capacity for seeing them as such and not as functions of one’s own will withers, as does that, above all, of fruitful contrast, the possibility of going beyond oneself by assimilating the contradictory. ¹⁸

The substance behind this strongly evaluative language can now be rendered in broad strokes. Rather than explore institutional entitlements or rights protections, Adorno’s normative concerns revolve around an importantly different set of questions. ²⁰ Do these social practices offer the conditions for undamaged personhood? Will these norms, construed in this way, damage or foster the relational space that binds its members and shapes their interactions? And though we may have significant questions over the criterion of ‘healthy’ personhood (or what the grounds for any such judgment might be), the most productive difficulties stem from Adorno’s effort to press beyond standard narratives of reification (in which capitalism is the prime mover) to situate these pathologies within the resources of reason. Doing justice to this proposal would require a different essay altogether. ²¹ This move gains some helpful substance when set against recent efforts to expand the claims of reason into the discursive forms through which subjects deliberate over shared institutions and norms. For, as Jay Bernstein has productively argued, the communicationalist effort to supersede the ‘dead end’ of the Frankfurt School carries a significant liability. If it likewise resists the monological reduction of reason (i.e. some instrumental capacity, immune to culture or history, hard-wired into the subject), it nonetheless fails to capture the materialist depth of Adorno’s ethical theory: what can count as a reason in these discursive forums (i.e. what can be authoritative for us) rests upon a motivationally deeper formation, through which socially available value structures mediate the place and meaning of others within the subject’s motivational economy. ²² And by expanding the question along these subject-formative lines, Adorno’s critical rationalism turns upon two core points. These historically-thick resources do not only condition the appeals that we offer in negotiations over social space, but ultimately structure a) whether the needs, interests, or suffering of others will meaningfully claim us (i.e, demanding response, reparation, recognition, etc.), and b) what quality these provocations will have (e.g., instances for care, aggression, anxiety, spectatorial indifference, etc.).

To return, then, to our guiding question, Adorno’s analytic of false life can be described as a transcendental social ontology with normative aims: the values on the basis of which subjects give reflective shape to their other-relations have social conditions, and when these conditions are lacking or distorted, so too will be the relational practices they orient. As he offers, this social form ‘is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfill his destiny as a human being’. ²³ Or, to put the point in the Hegelian terms of Minima Moralia, the contradiction between the ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ in false life means that existing conditions for subjecthood deform the comportments that are persistently construed (in liberal terms) as matters of choice (evacuated of social content) or character (within a privatized, moral framework). As Adorno proposes, such a society generates agents who fetishize individuality, and yet perform this ideal through the homogenizing options and modes of mass culture. ²⁴ It revolves around the dignity of the person, and yet cultivates indifference towards the needs or hurt constitutive of this self-relation. And, readers have noted, this leads to what might be the bleakest conclusion at the level of moral epistemology: such deformations come to obscure the emphatic meaning of these values – leaving us wanting for the critical resources against which our practices might be measured, evaluated or challenged. ²⁵

The specific implications for the normative good of difference will be treated in the next section. From these disparate threads, however, one provisional conclusion offers itself. It is not simply that liberalism goes wrong when it presumes an impoverished social ontology; rather, this institutionalist approach (marked by the opposition of ‘the right’ and ‘the good’) ultimately blocks access to the conditions under which core liberal ideals could be satisfied (or, alternately, are ruined and compromised). For, if Minima Moralia may seem to present an impressionistic anthropology of life under conditions of fascism or capitalism, what binds these moments is the singular thesis: the material conditions under which liberal values take shape presently deform the very commitments that liberal subjects endorse. Or, to put the stakes of the argument altogether too quickly: the deepest methodological shortcoming of liberalism is not that the answers are wrong – it is that the necessary questions cannot show up.

III

This rough account begs a number of the questions that have long plagued Adorno’s readers. Perhaps most significant: what is the force of this kein on the basis of which right life is unavailable to the subjects of a ‘false’ social space, and what possibility does this strong thesis of closure leave for emancipatory thought or practice? If the pathologies of reason are as totalizing as suggested, then how can Adorno reflexively justify his own critical standpoint? These difficulties have spawned a robust secondary literature. ²⁶ To hew more closely to the concerns of the article, however, it is necessary to use these broad considerations to clarify the value at stake within Adorno’s utopian renderings. Specifically, we must ask what are the pathologies of difference that cannot be accessed from within the liberal framework – how are they rooted within a particular form of reason – and how might they be addressed so as to diminish the violence they set into motion?

Such questions can be approached through the analytic resources developed to this point. For, if both models rest upon a cognate set of appeals to such goods as diversity and plurality, their critical tension hinges upon a) how difference figures within the orientational forms of a damaged modernity, and b) how this construal deforms the normative content of this value. A short route to these concerns can be found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which tracks how the Enlightenment project of social rationalization generates pathologies at odds with its emancipatory aims. This charge can be thought along two rough axes. Most prominently, once reason overbids on ‘the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable’ it can no longer accommodate the authority of the particular. ²⁷ The point can be put in stronger terms. It is not simply that disenchanted reason fails to grapple with the idiosyncrasy of experience; rather, in its effort to domesticate the unknown, it substitutes dematerialized categorial terms for the sensuous particularity of its objects – up to the mathematized forms through which the natural sciences master nature. And to shift to the genealogical register of the argument, this strategy of substitution can be traced to an idealist grammar of autonomy – which demands that we resist ‘the given’ (as a binding source of claims), so as to follow only those norms that reason legislates to itself. ²⁸ It is through this autonomist framework that the threads of the argument can ultimately be linked. ²⁹ For if authority is rooted within the spontaneous exercise of reason, only standards internal to thought – purified of the idiosyncratic, particular and sensuous – can be admitted as rationally binding. ³⁰

From this broad diagnosis of disenchanted reason follow a number of normative trajectories. To begin on familiar ground, Adorno identifies this abstractive turn as the condition for the capitalist colonization of social space. In brute terms, ‘representation gives way to universal fungibility’. ³¹ For, it is only when particularity has been deprived of mattering that qualitatively distinct things can be translated into monistic value languages, and all areas of life (whether shoes, labour power, vegetables or art works) enter into circuits of exchange, mediated by the monetary form. And though the dominion of exchange value is standard Marxian grist, a less narrowly economistic thread stems from how this abstract universality (one that absorbs and erodes the authority of the particular) is reflected in the ‘irrational rationality’ of liberal moral grammars – where normative status is extended along the universal valence of ‘the human’, law is privileged as the paradigmatic normative form, and the suffering of singular bodies can no longer be redeemed in rational terms. ³² Accordingly, within bourgeois justice ‘equivalence itself becomes a fetish’. ³³ As Christoph Menke notes, here Adorno presses this abstractive turn beyond an aggressive, expansionist market. Rather, this rationalized blindness to particularity comes to infect even the reparative efforts of moral philosophy – privileging etiolated, procedural forms, incapable of recognizing these fearful eyes, this hand stretched out in need, or this lover’s tears as sources of authoritative moral claims. ³⁴ The particular, in this case, is reduced to the ‘merely personal’ that claims nothing until translated into the universal entitlements of the human (a process that leaves both terms damaged).

An adequate engagement with the formula that opened the essay demands caution on this point. For, if this grammar of abstraction plays a substantial role in Adorno's critique of modernity, it cannot explain why he construes the pathologies of difference in terms of fear, rather than indifference or fungibility. Without further elaboration, this affectually-thick formulation would represent little more than rhetorical window-dressing, or evidence that Adorno has (against core materialist commitments) imported a dehistoricized psychology of other-relation into his social theory. Indeed, large parts of Dialectic of Enlightenment might seem to read such a primordial fear into the earliest prehistory of humanity. These moments gain critical heft, however, by reconsidering the legislative imperative of enlightened reason – to be ‘at home’™ in a world fully worked over by the acts of consciousness (and reflectively recognized as such). The argument here turns upon a significant ambivalence. Where this project of self-grounding seeks to resist the opaque authority of ‘the given’, Adorno proposes that it reflects a deformation of experience and identity. That is, the self is not only defined by relation to what it is not (on standard dialectical premises), but is fundamentally gained through the provocations of otherness – a debt that is non-recuperable by the legislative acts of the subject. As Adorno proposes, ‘the name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.’³⁵ And where we might take this to suggest a familiar materialist insistence on thought's unacknowledged conditions (i.e., the ‘constitutive character of the non-conceptual’³⁶), the path of negative dialectics reveals the torsion of this legislative project. For, it is precisely this debt that is willed away by desires to think a subject that is finally and fully in mastery of itself – one that cannot recognize any moment of exteriority, passivity, or receptivity as meaningfully its ‘own'.³⁷ This has led Adorno's materialist readers (Jarvis, Bernstein) to propose that disenchanted reason operates in terms of disavowal – a refusal to acknowledge that thought depends on conditions (material, somatic, etc.) that exceed and render possible its categories of meaning. ³⁸

As Robert Pippin has proposed, there may be significant questions over whether this line of criticism adequately captures Kant's model of experience or the tensions in the post-Kantian development of idealism. ³⁹ More important for current purposes, however, is how Adorno takes this autonomist imperative to symptomatize broader, relational pathologies – and thus why this grammar of suppression matters in a normative sense. As he proposes (in a discussion of Novalis), this equation of autonomy and conceptual immanence does not simply track a disenchanted alienation from nature. Rather, it finds its ultimate expression within ‘the archaic barbarism that the longing subject cannot love what is alien and different’ – a mode of refusal linked to ‘the craving for incorporation and persecution’ (der archaischen Barbarei, daߟ das sehnsüchtige Subjekt außerstande ist, das Fremde, das, was anders ist, zu lieben; mit der Gier nach Einverleibung und Verfolgung). To elaborate the argumentative substance at work, such charges reflect the meaning this dependency acquires when it can no longer find a place within the resources for selfhood. At stake is not merely an incapacity to recognize the material conditions of experience, in which case the difficulty could be reduced to a charge of reflexive blindness. Rather, this language of incorporation (Einverleibung) suggests a pathological orientation towards these reminders of the self’s contingency and finitude. This self oscillates between a debt it cannot profess (while preserving its integrity), and an otherness it cannot eliminate – and thus twists in ambivalence toward those sources it needs, yet cannot avow. In philosophical shorthand, ‘rage is the mark of each and every idealism’. ⁴⁰ To express the claim in less psychologically freighted terms, this debt is resolved at prohibitive cost: the different (i.e. the extra-conceptual provocations that render experience possible) is systematically reduced to the same (i.e. the categorial projections of this self). And by so doing, ‘identitary’ reason turns upon what Adorno terms the ‘nonidentical’: those conditions of experience (the sensuous, the particular, the somatic, the alien) that are denied rational acknowledgement, stripped of the authority they might carry, and thus left to persist in damaged, attenuated form.

To this point, the diagnosis has been pitched in terms of conceptuality – a framework that begs the familiar Habermasian reservations: these charges (e.g. rage, persecution, damage, violence) are construed so broadly as to be unintelligible in moral terms. ⁴¹ More clearly normative stakes follow, however, from what might be termed Adorno’s thesis of totality: this relational grammar extends beyond the encounter with objects or nature, so as to inflect the material organization of social space – how bodies speak to us, how they might trouble or unsettle us, and what kinds of demands they can (or cannot) make upon us. The concerns of the previous section offer one route to these conclusions. Asocial modes of market individualism undercut the basis that the needs, wants or hurt of others might claim us in authoritative ways (outside of whatever obligations such individuals voluntarily contract). And Adorno develops the significance of this disavowal beyond a neoliberal moral framework, which locates responsibility solely upon individual shoulders (no matter the social grounds for exposure to poverty, disease and violence). As he elaborates the possibility of the Holocaust, ‘the coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers knew this, and they put it to the test ever anew.’ ⁴² This ‘spell of coldness’ that attends bourgeois reason thus details the condition under which ‘respectable’ agents could turn away from neighbours selected for the camps. Once the limits of mattering are rigorously reduced to the individual, these doomed agents could no longer interrupt this self-regard to claim those who stood by. Rather, the mass extermination of bodies could take the character of an industrial project – one that could just as well be applied to the cessation of life as it can the production of automobiles or the splitting of the atom.

This refusal of moral mattering is a well-known avenue for theorizing mass violence. A less familiar (and more pointed) register arises, however, when Adorno suggests that this orientation towards difference itself represents an ur-violence – one in which the subject’s incapacity to avow its structuring debts gives rise to relational pathologies. In this case, the linkage of fear and difference figures a damaged mode of incorporation, rather than a denial of connection altogether. As Adorno and Horkheimer offer, ‘if, even within the field of logic, the concept stands opposed to the particular as something merely external, anything which stands for difference within society itself must indeed tremble. Everyone is labeled friend or foe.’ ⁴³ Such reflections help to link these epistemological-experiential themes to the broadly political register – and ultimately, to the nightmare case that haunts Adorno’s moral theory: the exterminatory violence of fascist nationhood. On this reading, the violence of National Socialism does not reflect some primary aggression unbound by reason; nor, as his irrationalist readers maintain, does it represent some flat excess of reason (as a single term, with a single set of meanings);⁴⁴ rather, it reflects a pathological form of reason – one that ‘exists only in so far as it can subjugate something different from and alien to itself.’ ⁴⁵ And this logical grammar takes on greater bite by attending to the fascist mobilization of the ‘we’ within a mixed social space. Because this relational structure cannot avow the alien as a condition for selfhood, differential articulations of identity (e.g. the homosexual, the Jew, the gypsy) are persistently figured as a contamination to the hegemonic national subject. It is ultimately this ‘perversion of universality’ – construed in naturalized, racial terms – that Adorno places at the heart of fascist race theory. This damaged subject resolves such anxieties not by interrogating its categories for belonging, so as to open more flexible construals of the ‘we’ (and thus more expansive possibilities of what this social ‘universal’ could yet be), but rather by `beating the life out of' those elements that trouble its racialized claim to totality. ⁴⁶ Such elements are incorporated on terms that strip them of their difference or they are eliminated, to stave off the degeneracy they threaten. Or, as Adorno closes the circle between this logical structure and ethnocidal violence: ‘genocide is the absolute integration’ (Der Völkermord ist die absolute Integration). ⁴⁷

From this unwieldy constellation of logical, experiential and moral themes, a coherent normative diagnosis can now be isolated. This model of selfhood cannot account for its constitutive entanglements with difference, and thus twists in anxiety towards what it can only perceive as unmastered remainders, threatening self-loss or pollution. To approach this torsion from a different angle, the non-identical is not a neutral exterior, but ‘the stale remnant left after identification has carved out its share. Under the spell, what is different – and the slightest admixture of which would indeed be incompatible with the spell – will turn to poison.’ ⁴⁸ And, where communicative critics seek to sequester this orientation within object-relations (so as to exploit the emancipatory resources of communication) the hyperbolic character of Adorno’s account follows from his insistence that no such linguistic preserve can be found, immune from these damages of reason. ⁴⁹ As revealed by fascist campaigns of extermination, this grammar of reduction comes to infect the deepest structures of community – one that reconciles its anxieties by performing the disavowal inscribed within its self-understanding. This ideal of purification (and the violence to which it gives rise) permits a final pass at the formula with which we began. If a utopian alternative would be a ‘difference without fear', it is not the fear of the racist (as a privatized matter of belief or character) in question; nor is it the fear of cruelty that Judith Shklar places at the heart of the liberal project (as an axiomatic first premise to be staved off through institutional means). ⁵⁰ Rather, the fear that Adorno links to difference symptomatizes a damaged modality of selfhood. A self haunted by otherness as its unavowable condition of possibility – and thus a self for whom otherness must be cleansed or erased.

IV

Adorno’s wide-ranging approach is admittedly difficult to square with contemporary tendencies towards methodological restraint. And his highly metaphorical presentation leaves the reader with significant questions as to its philosophical backing. As the foregoing demonstrates, however, the normative substance of the argument is located within two, core moments. At a diagnostic level, this grammar of violence reflects a rationalized incapacity to accommodate the difference through which identity is forged. And, if this proposal courts standard Hegelian territory, it is Adorno’s effort to salvage the ‘nonidentitary’ moment that provides a strongly materialist rejoinder – so as to redeem the core dialectical intuition (that identity is always negotiated through the provocations of otherness) without arguing away this debt or the vulnerability it carries. In short form: ‘the reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own.’ ⁵¹ It is on this point that many of the classic difficulties arise. For if such appeals to ‘the alien’ suggest an imperative to develop resources of thought to acknowledge this debt, Adorno’s reluctance to provide any positive content generates no small degree of difficulty for even his sympathetic commentators. Accordingly, it will be useful to close by reading his demand for critical responsibility beyond the letter of his texts – in which the pathologies of reason exert an ever more suffocating closure upon emancipatory practice.

As suggested from the outset, Adorno resists any determinate rendering on the grounds that there is no way to step outside these damaged forms of meaning and experience. Utopia, he insists is ‘draped in black’ and thus not fully available to rational reconstruction. ⁵² A productive direction can be found, however, in Romand Coles’s proposal to construe these utopian hints in immanent terms. ⁵³ That is, mitigating this violence towards the non-identical begins by accounting for what is concealed, suppressed or damaged through dominant forms of thought, identity and meaning (and thus a reflexive vigilance towards our categories of sense and orientation). This strategy can be thought in at least two ways – one familiar, another less so. At the very least, Adorno’s meditations on somatic suffering enjoin us to recognize how a discursivist closure on moral reasoning has eviscerated the embodied and sensuous as sources of authoritative claims. ⁵⁴ As Bernstein has argued, for instance, it is only through the somatic moment that we grasp the badness of suffering (and the necessity of its reparation) in ways that cannot be fully redeemed through discursive reasons – and thus what is lost within a rationalized reduction of moral experience. ⁵⁵ To offer a trajectory more closely oriented toward our guiding theme, however, this care for non-identity suggests an interrogation of the relational forms that orient social space – more specifically, how ostensibly neutral categories of inclusion rest upon the structure of disavowal detailed to this point – and, by extension, incorporate bearers of difference on terms that bury, repress, and liquidate its core features.

There are a number of ways to lend content to this proposal. A natural starting point might be the nativist response to global movements of populations. As revealed by strident appeals to the ‘authentic’ nation, this subject reads foreign bodies not as an enrichment to the practice of community – or a contribution to the unruly sights and sounds of democratic space – but rather a corruption to a fixed inheritance, founded within some mythicized past. Because identity, in this case, is not approached as a reiterative process, negotiated (and renegotiated) through a shifting field of entanglements, these others (marked by strange beliefs, dress or language) haunt the national ‘us’ with erosion or loss. Such strangers must be carefully monitored, expelled beyond our borders or forced to learn and profess our ways. And this kind of closure is surely not limited to the paranoiac construal of nationhood. As theorists of a Foucaultian stripe (e.g., Butler, Connolly) have convincingly argued, for instance, the force of ‘normality’ works through a similar grammar – where this category privileges certain forms of desire, attachment, or embodiment and renders other such forms socially illegible, degenerate or perverse.⁵⁶ When viewed through this lens, others do not present unmarked alternatives to hegemonic commitments, but pathological deviations from the norm, demanding correction and cure. And, if the alien or deviant is generated through the particularity of these categories (i.e., the unavowable alternatives against which the normal self is defined), then this suggests a minimal content to the following proposal: ‘A truly achieved identity would have to be the consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately perhaps, it would have to be the creation of a reconciled non-identity … ’ ⁵⁷ Though the appeal is obscure as formulated, the resources developed to this point allow us to distinguish this ‘care for the non-identical’ from an abstract reverence towards otherness (to invoke fashionable terms). ⁵⁸ For, if selfhood is gained through engagement with all that the self is not, this injunction would resist the temptation of purity (in which the alien must be excised, cured or assimilated), to call instead for a reflexive project: to abide in the uncertainty of a common life that is perpetually and necessarily under negotiation due to the constitutive impurity of selfhood. Or, to put this in Adorno’s own terms, the task would be to ‘go beyond oneself’ by cultivating forms of reason (and thus forms of relationship) in which these entanglements could be reflectively avowed as the condition for identity, rather than its undoing. ⁵⁹

As Morton Schoolman has argued, such gestures gain focus through a theme that haunts Dialectic of Enlightenment: the relational forms that have (through the process of disenchantment) come to be associated with aesthetic experience. ⁶⁰ Where enlightened reason is defined by hostility toward otherness – a stance of refusal and control – the aesthetic framework sketches more receptively nuanced modes of sensibility. Perception, in this case, does not aim to master the different, so as to assign each element to its proper place (separate from, and fully legible to the self), but rather engages the object in its strangeness, so as to promote an encounter that might rebound upon the subject's structures of meaning, and elicit their transformation or disruption. ⁶¹ This ‘priority of the object’ (Vorrang des Objekts) takes on greater normative weight when approached as an orientation towards unfamiliar lives and bodies. As Schoolman renders the point: ‘Affirming that difference is unfathomable the aesthetics of darkness appeals for a politics of darkness to protect difference from the abuses of identifying thought by letting difference be.’ ⁶² There are surely difficulties in the language employed – particularly the strongly Heideggerian character of ‘letting be’. To give the proposal greater Adornian resonance, it suggests not a passive alternative to the imposition of meaning, but an active attentiveness to these remainders, in such a way that `hearing' them (i.e., in their singularity and excess) would demand an expansion of the terms through which the subject grapples with the alien. At stake, then, is ultimately a mode of practicing selfhood in relation to difference – one that could more adequately shelter the latter's unfamiliarity. The core commitment would not be self-possession (thereby rendered brittle and inflexible), but a reflective openness to the object, in which the subject is also at stake. In the terms of Dialectic of Enlightenment, these reparative hints are already contained within Odysseus’ desire to endure the song of the Sirens, and yet his choice for self- mastery. ⁶³ And this ambivalence is surely significant. It does not simply flag a fateful moment for the historical development of reason, but rather a cautionary, genealogical note. That is, any form of selfhood threatens to immunize itself against the unsettling provocations of difference; and thus any such posture must be tempered by a reflexive sensitivity toward the claims it silences or refuses.

Such a reading yields rich resources for a less violent habitation of democratic space – one that makes it very difficult to follow those who charge Adorno with a rearguard refusal of social differentiation. ⁶⁴ That said, it raises significant questions of its own. At the very least, we may be inclined to question the possibility of transforming these relational practices (or the forms of reason upon which they are based) once situated so deeply within the resources for selfhood. We may be sceptical whether Adorno’s appeal to non-violence is sufficiently attentive to the specificities of politics and power – or whether it substitutes a model of ethical subjectivity for the agonic difficulties of political practice. And we may wonder whether these epistemological-experiential appeals to the ‘non-identical’ furnish sufficient resources to conduct the difficult political work of listening to those whose claims are elided through (and might threaten to destabilize) hegemonic frameworks of social membership. ⁶⁵ That said, the guiding concerns of the article lead me to close on a different note. For where Schoolman concludes that this defence of heterogeneity ‘forms a natural alliance with certain features of the liberal tradition’, this rhetorical and normative overlap should not be pushed so far as to obscure Adorno’s outstanding challenge to the liberal project. ⁶⁶ In a word, this shared care for difference must not elide the important differences between these approaches.

As briefly elaborated, dominant strains of liberalism assume a fundamentally antagonistic social space, whose basic character is beyond the purview of political choice and deliberation – in which case, the central question is how these intransigent causes of conflict can be assigned to the private and consensus secured on what might be meaningfully shared. On this point, it would be easy to invoke a rejoinder long associated with multicultural and feminist theorists: rather than conduct the difficult work of grappling with group privilege, this strategy jettisons the troubling characteristics of difference and leaves a bloodless diversity behind – one that can be ‘celebrated’ without risk. In Adorno's terms, this reveals a classic strategy through which the non-identitary takes social shape: forms of assimilation, pressed upon vulnerable groups, that elide what is genuinely different about their practice of life. Normative appeals to the sacred are reduced to private matters of belief; counter-hegemonic forms of desire and attachment are given voice in annual parades; and cultural practices are reduced to fashion statements or culinary options. That said, Adorno’s effort to detail the relational dynamics of violence suggests an importantly different line of critical pressure. For when liberal theory brackets substantive questions of identity and relationship due to their ostensibly non-political character, it represents antagonism as a brute datum, rather than a historically thick practice rooted within the perceived instabilities of group identity. Or put differently, beginning with this axiom has the ultimate effect of naturalizing (and thus depoliticizing) patterns of relationship that have taken shape through specific ways of construing identity in relation to difference – ways that express the anxieties of dominant groups as they attempt to preserve hegemony over social space. ⁶⁷ And, in this case, what is lacking is the reflexive moment of Adorno’s proposal, whereby hegemonic forms of belonging (i.e. the human, the nation, the normal) are also transformed to make space for the lives they might accommodate and shelter.

For those sceptical about the ethicization of politics represented by Adorno’s positive rendering, it is perhaps the question it poses to liberal certitudes that proves most compelling. There may be strong historical precedents for this bracketing of ‘private’ considerations from ‘public’ deliberation (precedents that are elided when approached in ahistorical terms). And there are surely historical and political grounds for why certain groups are perceived as invidiously alien, while others pass unmarked – grounds irreducible to the social-ontological terms sketched to this point. By highlighting these relational dynamics of closure, however, Adorno offers a standing provocation to even the positive, ameliorative renderings of liberal polities – that systematically present the non-violent practice of toleration as an individual choice by citizens (and intolerance along the same privatized, behavioural lines) rather than a reflexive interrogation of a) our shared culture of political membership, and b) how such cultures dispose citizens to negotiate anxieties over loyalties, allegiances and belonging. As Adorno proposes throughout Minima Moralia, the tendency to construe normative goods along individualized, moral lines already symptomatizes social pathologies, in that private commitments (love, fidelity, intimacy, etc.) are forced to bear the burden for compromised public practices. ⁶⁸ This reservation permits a final way to render the tension. At stake is not what the liberal approach does (above and beyond what it intends), but rather what it fails to reflect upon, due to its methodological strictures: that is, just how difference is defined and mobilized within social space, what kind of normative character this difference will take, and how certain groups are constructed and perceived as deviant objects worthy of special attention, concern or vigilance. To put Adorno’s intuition differently, it is only by asking such questions that we recognize that difference is not a fact, to be approached as a self-evident problem – but rather follows from specific anxieties, built into the unstable constellation of identity and otherness, that take particularly virulent form when these debts are blocked from reflective processing through conversations over who ‘we’ take ourselves to be, and how these understandings might be revised so as to meet the inclusionary ideals of democratic life.

On this point, Adorno offers few answers – and here, the suspicion that he shirks the vocation of a sufficiently robust critical theory may well be sustained. That said, this normative framework of difference offers a fruitful set of provocations for those who seek to meet the challenges of a world in which proliferating identity claims unsettle the grounds on which the ‘we’ has been drawn and the bonds of community inscribed. More specifically, Adorno’s ongoing challenge might not rest within a set of answers that we could faithfully press into practice – but rather by helping to shift the questions that have long dominated reflection upon the resources and difficulties of a differential social space. Perhaps the issue is not (to borrow a phrase from Will Kymlicka) simply how difference is to be accommodated in a stable, morally defensible manner, but rather how is difference defined and mobilized? ⁶⁹ On the basis of what relational patterns and reflective forms will difference take on a character that demands resolution? What anxieties demand that certain groups, persons, desires or forms of attachment will be perceived as threatening or aberrant and which will be innocuous? If no easy answers are available, it is on these questions that contemporary engagements with difference would need to reflect in order to do justice to the aims they profess.