Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

“KAFKA’S POPULARITY,” Adorno observed, is due to “that comfort in the uncomfortable which has made of him an information bureau of the human condition, be it eternal or modern, and which knowingly dispenses with the scandal on which his work is built.” He goes on to say that Kafka’s work “is assimilated into an established trend of thought while little attention is paid to those aspects of his work which resist such assimilation, and which, precisely for this reason, require interpretation.”¹ Ironically, Adorno’s work has arguably suffered an even harsher fate.² Even if his work is often praised, especially his aesthetic theory and the ethical import of his critique of German Idealism and identitarian thinking, his popularity often resides more in assimilations of his thought to contemporary philosophical or theoretical trends than in careful engagements with his complex body of work and with those aspects requiring, even demanding, interpretation. In these assimilations, the scandal of his critical theory, its roots in the dialectical legacy of Hegelian Marxism, is dispensed with, or quietly played down, with largely perfunctory gestures acknowledging its obdurate presence.

Nowhere is this more clearly at work than in the “ethical Adorno” that pervades many an interpretation of his thought, or what a scholar has characterized as the different “ethical turns” that have defined the Anglo-American reception of Adorno’s thought.³ Descriptions of the ethical impulse informing Adorno’s work vary, to be sure, even if neglect of the scandal is a common thread: Adorno is said to be the proponent of an “ethical modernism,” an ethical stance that should be seen as a nonthreatening contribution to the predominant analytical approach to ethics, or brigaded as the bearer of an ethical message that is seen as a forerunner or precursor of deconstruction or as a thinker of neo-Nietzschean “generosity” that seeks to radicalize the ethos of liberal democracy.⁴ Efforts such as J. M. Bernstein’s, for instance, lead to a very un-Adornian position, one that does little justice to the political and dialectical impulses animating Adorno’s philosophical reflections.⁵ But once compared with other interpretations, Bernstein’s account is fidelity itself. Consider, for instance, Martin Seel’s rather inane assertion that “it may be time to free Adorno’s philosophy from the dogma and trauma of negativity, from its sometimes-obsessive fixation with Hegel…. It may also be time to lay bare the ethical coordinates that mark every line of his social and political diagnoses. Adorno finally belongs with Nietzsche and Heidegger.” ⁶ In this reading, what the critic does not like is unceremoniously dispatched in the name of “freeing” Adorno from “restrictive readings,” parallels with Nietzsche and Heidegger are duly if superficially contrived, and Adorno is enlisted as a contemplative ethical philosopher of the Other. Or consider Hent de Vries’s celebrated work, Minimal Theologies, where, from the very outset, Adorno’s negative dialectics is translated into protodeconstructionist terms. By way of “a careful interpretation,” de Vries cuts Adorno down to size and forces him to echo Levinasian motifs. Once passed through the Levinasian blender, Adorno’s critical theory is characterized as “premised on a similar oscillation between formalization and abstraction, on the one hand, and materialization qua singularization, on the other”; and both Adorno and Levinas are presented as placing “determinants (the ethical, the political, the cultural, the juridical, etc.) under erasure.”⁷ And, just like that, Adorno becomes a deconstructionist avant la lettre, closer to the Heideggerian legacy he detested than to that of Hegel, which he scrupulously worked through and considered central to his own philosophical project.

But, notwithstanding these efforts, the political and ethical import of Adorno’s original inheritance of the dialectical legacy cannot be taken in isolation from Hegelian Marxism. While inflected with strong and important Nietzschean and modernist motifs, Adorno’s critical theory derives its sharpest edge from his inheritance of this legacy. After all, his Magnus Opus was Negative Dialectics, and its most important axial concepts are politically and socially infused, as evidenced by his central themes—including “totality,” “constellations,” “reification,” “mediation,” “exchange-process,” “the total social process,” “the culture industry,” “the objective theory of society,” “autonomy,” and “emancipation,” among others. These notions profoundly mediate the political and ethical import of his negative dialectics, which goes well beyond the conceits of the ethical turn.⁸ Mediating every word Adorno wrote was a profound articulation of the dialectical legacy, a politically infused commitment to social critique, and a no less important commitment to conceptual rigor and bindingness.⁹

That this is so is readily evident in Adorno’s “morality of thinking” as he expounds it in Minima Moralia, a conceptual formulation that is utterly infused with dialectical and political concerns.¹⁰ What is more, Adorno’s critical theory resists hypostatizing theoretical knowledge. Rather, thinking proceeds from a politically infused sociological and cognitive perspective.¹¹ And these are constitutive moments of his dialectical critical theory that are not only inseparable from the ethical motifs of his work, but without which Adorno’s critical theory is bound to be truncated. Accordingly, an elucidation of the place of political responsibility in Adorno’s writings, of the ways in which his reflections radically restage the intersections and antinomies between freedom and responsibility in predicaments of power largely defined by capitalist domination and analogous modalities of instrumental reason and depoliticized politics, needs to reckon with the aforementioned “antinomies,” not in order to mend or hypostatize them as aporias, let alone reconcile or, worse yet, displace them by neologisms. Rather, an effort has to be made to dialectically render these antinomies as contradictions arising from a historically constituted situation. For a defining attribute of Adorno’s thinking is its distanced nearness to history. Yet history conceptualized as an objective process, a conceptually bound narrative account of the mediations of human interaction with nature, not as in Heidegger’s hypostatized “historicity,” is the central objective experience of negative dialectics, for which Adorno’s critical theory is its subjective expression. As such, it is important to not only expound its centrality in the theoretical armature of his writings, but to understand it as a mediating objective reality that is fundamental for a comprehension of Adorno’s reworking of the dialectical legacy and the historical and political situation to which his critical theory is a response.

Although there is little doubt about the continuities in Adorno’s thought—from his 1931 essay “The Actuality of Philosophy” to his posthumous Aesthetic Theory—his thinking was thoroughly mediated by historical experience, inflected by it to its very core; and as it is fitting for a dialectical thinker, many discontinuities and changes of emphasis and inflections took place in response to changing situations.¹² Of course, the formative importance of Germany’s Weimar Republic, along with the intellectual and artistic milieu defining it, is relatively well-known in the English-speaking world, and so is the formative role of the years that Adorno and his cohort of émigrés spent in the United States, first in New York and then in California.¹³ Suffice it for now to mention an obvious historical point that ironically is seldom accorded the theoretical attention it deserves: with the arrival of critical theory on American shores, an important moment of mediation and transmission took place, one in which ideas not only traveled, or were productively misplaced, but one that also provided Adorno with an objective reality from which his reworking of the dialectical legacy cannot be dirempted. Indeed, during this period of exile ideas underwent a moment of transmission and mediation that left a permanent imprint in Adorno’s critical theory and its thought forms.

Nowhere is this perhaps more obvious than in how experiences of catastrophe and exile are central for the crystallization of a critical theory that, in turn, would become fully formulated through another mediation: Adorno’s return to Germany. Adorno’s conceptualization of negative dialectics not only responded to philosophical questions immanent to Hegelian Marxism but also constituted a response to objective historical experiences and is thoroughly mediated by them. Carefully exploring how experiences of exile and catastrophe are constitutive mediations in Adorno’s critical theory yields a more nuanced understanding of Adorno’s theoretical forms and his political responses to the German scene. These historical experiences are part of the content of Adorno’s minimalist humanism, which is best characterized as “an enormous minimalism.”¹⁴ This enormous minimalism dialectically conveys historicity and history in its minimalist forms, as these betray a force field of social relations and mediations that is rendered visible by way of its economy.¹⁵ This minimal humanism is forged by exile, which emerges as a central concept for the constellation of categories and concepts, ideas and motifs that constitute Adorno’s critical theory.¹⁶

Autonomy, emancipation, and distanced nearness—these are some of the axial concepts constitutive of Adorno’s critical constellation during his American exile, concepts directly bearing on his conception of responsible thinking. Upon his return to Germany, these concepts gained a different set of political valences, not least in relation to how the catastrophe, Auschwitz, had an entirely different resonance in a German context than it did on the Pacific coast. Furthermore, the onset of the cold war led to a different international situation where Adorno’s account of the catastrophe yielded to a richer insight into the reality of torture as a catastrophe that pervades and historicizes Auschwitz.¹⁷ All this became central for his postexilic conceptualization of the possibility of ethical and political life after Auschwitz and all this was mediated by his response to the situation conformed by Adenauer’s Germany, the cold war, and the subsequent radicalism of the sixties. By the time Adorno returned to Germany, a peculiar modality of liberal democracy—what Jan-Werner Müller has acutely referred to as “militant” or “constrained” democracy—had crystallized in the Federal Republic. It had become a liberal-democratic order largely defined by insulation of both ruling elites and markets from direct encroachments by the masses, a mild aversion to popular sovereignty, staunch anticommunism, and prohibitions and exclusions sanctioned by constitutional courts.¹⁸ Just like his American exile, returning to this new Germany was in and of itself an instance of “transferring the untransferrable,” albeit in a fundamentally different way.¹⁹

Traces of Adorno’s experience of exile are found in the emphasis on nonidentity in his negative dialectics, which takes as its point of departure for reflection the concreteness of objective existence, its historical sediments, and politically constituted forms of suffering. This commitment to abolishing suffering is famously laid out in a passage from Negative Dialectics where he stated that “to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.”²⁰ The basic contours of this statement can be discerned in Adorno’s more explicit treatments of the question of suffering. For instance, in his 1962–63 lectures on philosophical terminology Adorno spoke about the need to “translate pain into the concept,” namely, the need for conceptual thinking to attempt to grasp, in distanced nearness, the pain and suffering of subjective experience as mediated by objective realities.²¹ Even if one cannot reproduce the suffering of the other at its most intimate, nor can it be subsumed in an autarkic concept or universal imperative, one can conceive it and, more important, conceive of the ways in which it can be ameliorated. And, as part of his formulations of concepts and categories, Adorno writes about physical suffering in more forthcoming terms when he writes that “all pain and all negativity” constitute “the moving forces of dialectical thinking.”²² Emancipated social relations demand redressing suffering—“The telos…would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reflexive forms of that suffering.”²³ The critical vocation of leading a voice to suffering also demands the need to understand its history, its political and ethical conditions of possibility, and the imperatives that structure its advent.²⁴ It is a political-ethical commitment.

The concrete universal that serves as Adorno’s point of departure, that instance of a material and historical process forcing imperatives upon critical thinking, is that of catastrophe in the twentieth century. This is best grasped as part of Adorno’s consideration of metaphysics as mediated by history and “the question whether one can live after Auschwitz,” which became the immediate point of departure for his more mature reflections on ethics and responsibility.²⁵ Auschwitz became the overwhelming concrete experience that signified the catastrophe of genocide in the twentieth century. But rather than using a particular Jewish term like Shoah, or a religiously charged one, such as Holocaust, or even a more general concept, say, genocide, Adorno always referred to this catastrophe by the concrete location of one of its most infamous killing centers, Auschwitz. Auschwitz, which for Adorno embodied the collapse of Western civilization, thus became a constant point of reference in his reflections. But it was not just an anomaly in an otherwise straight path of progress. According to Adorno, Auschwitz could be historicized without losing sight of its particularity, something that is consistent with the materialist moment of his formulation of critical theory.²⁶

Even so, and this is no less important, the centrality of Auschwitz does not lead to its elevation to a transhistorical moment of revelation. For while it symbolizes a caesura—hence, the centrality of “After” [Nach] in Adorno’s formulation, which is his way of offering the figuration of such rupture—critical thinking about Auschwitz requires an avowal of historical mediations. Particularly important is to grasp the before, that which precedes it and provides conditions for its intelligibility, but equally important is the after. As a catastrophe, Auschwitz is mediated by general historical trends. It thus punctuates a particular instantiation within these historical processes that is not reducible to a mere particularity of them. Hence both its identity and nonidentity with the total social process that mediates both the continuities and discontinuities it undoubtedly represents. Nor does “After Auschwitz” entail a negative benchmark that renders ongoing catastrophes invisible, or the normalization of a time after evil yet before justice, to use Robert Meister’s acute formulation of the ethicist responses prevalent in contemporary liberal ideology and discourse.²⁷ On the contrary, as Adorno more than once indicated, the caesura that Auschwitz figures is in relation to how the world was experienced and apprehended. It need not lead to an ethical suspension, nor to a bland ethics of negative freedom, much less to the liberalism of fear. Rather, it imposes a new imperative that is materially conceived and mediated through and through and that refuses to acquiesce to the neutralizing ethical pieties of current invocations of “After Auschwitz” at the service of domination, including imperialist domination by way of humanitarian ideology.

Out of the many formulations Adorno offered, a comment during one of his lectures is apposite here: “I do not know whether the principle that no poem can be written after Auschwitz can be sustained. But the idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has a meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one—I remind you of Vietnam—to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the pre-philosophical mind.”²⁸ “We” is a particular we in these formulations, however universal the lessons of the catastrophe are. Asserting its particular nature does not mean a disavowal of the universality involved. On the contrary, it asserts the simple insight that the instantiation of a universal always has a particular point of departure that its universality cannot extricate. Adorno’s “we” points out the way in which the caesura in question is particular to the European mind, but the critical import of his negative dialectics prevents any hypostatization of Auschwitz, either in his hands or in others. While Auschwitz is characterized as an evil, this catastrophe is something that pertains to humanity at large—just like, say, torture in Vietnam—but for which a particular collectivity was primarily responsible.²⁹ In this case, the German Federal Republic: both the successor state of the Third Reich and protectorate of the United States, the country waging war in Vietnam.

Adorno thus grappled with the question of Auschwitz mostly in terms of the crucial question of cognitive representation, which is where the political import of Adorno’s critical theory, and that of much of Western Marxism and its heirs—Fredric Jameson, Gillian Rose, and Slavoj Žižek come to mind—truly resides. Among the topics he reflected on are the impossibility of metaphysics as traditionally understood, art, education, as well as the significance of Auschwitz in the way memory, collective identity, individual autonomy, and democracy are understood in its aftermath. For instance, in “Education After Auschwitz” he states the seemingly rather modest, though essential aim of a reconceived education after the catastrophe. “Since the possibility of changing the objective—namely societal and political—conditions is extremely limited today, attempts to work against the repetition of Auschwitz are necessarily restricted to the subjective dimension.”³⁰ This statement attests to a moment of resignation that resonates with the common charge brought against Adorno of always finding refuge in a realm outside politics, say, the aesthetic, or, more damaging still, introducing a Kantian hold-out for the individual, which brings dialectical mediation to a halt and disavows the collective dimensions constitutive of ethical and political life.

But this awareness never amounted to acquiescence.³¹ What Adorno is alluding to in the foregoing passage is precisely the refusal to acquiesce, even when the prospects for change look dim in the current situation. In light of such political closure, he emphasizes the centrality of education and autonomy without hypostatizing either; what Adorno also refers to, in this essay and elsewhere, as an education for autonomy, for critique, that seeks to break with the indifference toward the stored human suffering permeating present-day forms of power.³² In any case, the sense of powerlessness that one might identify in some of his formulations responds to an awareness of the role of institutional and market imperatives in constraining, even depleting, individual autonomy in a liberal-capitalist society and the increasingly absent forms of effective political contestation in Western Europe, which was also a time of political defeat and the closure of alternatives within the German Federal Republic. Yet a critical concept of autonomy is still possible, and Auschwitz constitutes its historical-material cornerstone. “All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again.” In a similar vein, Adorno proceeds to criticize the doctrine of “reason of state,” as he rightly sees in that political logic “the horror…potentially already posited.”³³

Commentators and critics have found it tempting to interpret these as an iteration of the “never again” of the ethical turn. That is, however, anachronistic. Instead, what emerges from Adorno’s formulations is a critical conception of autonomy that seeks to educate individuals to have a critical attitude toward power and the leveling tendencies of commodification and instrumental rationality.³⁴ And this cultivation of critique Adorno revealingly yet laconically linked to genuine democracy, not to be confused with the depoliticized militant democracy bequeathed by the victorious Anglo-American Allies and shrewdly steered by Adenauer and his successors.³⁵ For Adorno, the aesthetic provided a realm where the somatic aspect of re-cognizing suffering could be apprehended, and with it the possibility of concentrated attention on its levels of constitution, and on the layers of historical sedimentation, found in its concrete manifestations.³⁶ Auschwitz thus yields one of Adorno’s most well-known formulations, the need for a new categorical imperative: “a new categorical imperative imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”³⁷

“After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate.”³⁸ But rather than the impossibility, or lack of ethical and political import of representing Auschwitz, this passage suggests a critique of the frivolous redemption of Auschwitz in crude instrumentalizations, not an ethical dictum against representation as such.³⁹ Auschwitz, precisely because of the imperative it imposes, needs to be comprehended from the perspective of negative dialectics. Indeed, destruction is associated with the principle of identity. And from the perspective of the materialist moment of his negative dialectics, it is necessary to represent this catastrophe in ways that draw attention to contemporary forms of superfluous suffering, exploitation, and domination.

Responsibility after Auschwitz thus demands responding politically to the different instances of human suffering that are historically constituted and politically sanctioned, not an undifferentiated imperative—again, negative dialectics consistently debunks any such hypostatization. Accordingly, Adorno’s claim in Negative Dialectics about lending a voice to suffering as the condition of all truth cannot be read literally, as an undifferentiated dictum, but rather in light of the constellation of mediations and differentiations that Negative Dialectics comprehensively stages. Once interpreted that way, it is evident that Adorno’s critical theory avows the imperative for critical cognition to apprehend the historically superfluous forms of suffering that are at once socially and politically produced and sustained. Intrinsic to the primacy of the object, which is the signature of Adorno’s formulation of dialectical thinking, is to record historically constituted catastrophic and tragic suffering—including that which conforms to humanity’s natural history—in its particular instantiations, not as particularities of a general trend.⁴⁰ Thinking can either acquiesce, tacitly or explicitly, to it, or sharply re-cognize it and thus denounce it.⁴¹ It is on the basis of the primacy of the object that the “transition to materialism” in Adorno’s critical theory is predicated.⁴²

Even the eminently subjective idea of the will is mediated by this dialectical conception of material objectivity and the mediation of historical processes. In a set of arresting formulations, Adorno discusses the ineluctability of a dialectical concept of the will and its heteronomous nature. Heteronomy understood as the determinate opposite of autonomy, as mediated by it. He establishes such constitutive heteronomy of the will by adducing the presence of physical impulses (Körperimpulse) in the will, as part of its constitution and actualization—impulses that the will ultimately “tames” and “potentially negates.” Therein lies its dialectical character. Following this argument, Adorno goes on to present a striking formulation that bears on his idea of immanent transcendence and his dialectical rendering of tradition: “It is the force that enables consciousness to leave its own domain and so to change what merely exists; its recoil is resistance.”⁴³ But the possibility of good will hardly offers moral certitude, which at best is a mirage and at worst immoral. Even so, it is a real possibility whose constitutive heteronomy needs to be avowed.

Adorno’s is a dialectical recasting of the will that, while echoing Hegel’s arresting immanent critique of Kantian formalism, takes its constitutive heteronomy in a different direction. As is well known, in his Philosophy of Right Hegel’s critique demonstrates the abstract nature of Kantian duty and proceeds immanently to show how Kant’s formalism, in and of itself, cannot encompass anything historically particular or concrete (§§133–34). After that he goes a step further to question Kant’s formalist claim to bindingness: “From this point of view, no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; of course, material may be brought in from outside and particular duties may be arrived at accordingly, but if the definition of duty is taken to be the absence of contradiction, formal correspondence with itself—which is nothing but the establishment of abstract indeterminacy—then no transition is possible to the specification of particular duties nor, if some such particular content for acting comes into consideration, is there any criterion in that principle for deciding whether it is or is not a duty” (§135).⁴⁴ While Adorno shares elements of Hegel’s critique, including the impossibility of an apodictic doctrine of autonomy and duty, he is not primarily concerned with the absence of criteria for normative judgments, let alone sublating the critique of Kantian autonomy in a robust conception of ethical life, although he would gesture in that direction.⁴⁵ Rather, Adorno’s concern is about a minima humana, one that cares about living rightly.

These concerns are further specified when Adorno challenges the Nazi hypostatization of the irrational moment of the will and then writes: “The self-evident good will becomes obdurate in its illusion, a historic sediment of the power which the will ought to resist.” “Die Selbstverständlichkeit guten Willens verstockt sich im Trugbild, geschichtliches Sediment der Macht, welcher der Wille zu widerstehen hätte.”⁴⁶ The will, once dialectically understood, forces us to dispense with the illusion of “moral certainty” and its platitudes. In a passage that echoes the critique of moralism from the perspective of a political ethic, something akin to that found in Brecht and Lao Tse, he further writes:

There is no moral certainty. Its mere assumption would be immoral, would falsely relieve the individual of anything that might be called morality [Sittlichkeit]. The more mercilessly an objective-antagonistic society will comport itself in any situation [jegliche Situation], the less can any single moral decision be warranted as the right one. Whatever the subject or the group may undertake against the totality they are part of is infected [angesteckt] by the evil of that totality, and no less so is the one who does nothing. This is how original sin has been secularized. The individual subject who thinks he is morally certain fails and is bound to become complicit because, being clamped to the social order, he is hardly able to do anything about the conditions but appeal to the moral ingenuim: crying for their change…. All conceivable definitions of the moral aspect down to the most formal, the unity of self-consciousness as reason, were squeezed out of that “matter” with which moral philosophy did not want to dirty its hands…. Without recourse to the material, no ought could be issued from reason; yet, once compelled to acknowledge its material in the abstract, as a condition of its own possibility, reason must not cut off its reflection on the specific material.⁴⁷

Adorno accordingly reclaimed an aspect Hegel’s idea of ethical life, but recast it in a materialist vein by showing how heteronomy is already interiorized in the idea of autonomy. Namely, ethics cannot be solely founded on reflection and reason, even if it ought to be rational in its means and ends, or on the somatic aspect of the will as residing in a body that is historically and socially mediated, but has to rest on the dialectical mediation that mutually constitutes its actualization, devoid of a first principle or of the illusion of an abstract reconciliation between the two.⁴⁸ This constitutive heteronomy of the will is a far cry from the hypostatization of the relationality of the subject found in Levinas and his heirs.

But Adorno’s conceptualization is not just a consequence of the centrality of the object in his negative dialectics, albeit the primacy of the object figures prominently in it.⁵⁰ It is also a corollary to his account of natural history, as expounded with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the dialectical nature of sacrifice is memorably conceptualized by way of Adorno’s reading of Homer’s Odyssey: self-preservation, whose violence only the violence of reason can arrest, is constitutive of the catastrophic nature of human history, of our natural history. Consequently, responsibility emerges here as a central category that is intrinsic not only to cognition but also for political action, where an ethics of conviction is bound to be abstract. This is how Adorno draws the contrast between the two: “An ethics of conviction is an ethics that seek refuge in the pure will, that is, it recognizes the interiority of the moral subject as its only authority. In contrast to that, the ethics of responsibility take as their starting point an existing reality, though in certain conditions this may be a mental reality, as perceived by the subject to which it is then counterpoised.”⁵¹

A concrete instantiation of the conflict between the two—which in Weber leads to an antinomy that could nonetheless be dialectically reformulated—is staged by way of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, in connection with which Adorno verbally conjures a scene of responsibility whose stakes he thus articulates:

By conceptualizing Ibsen’s staging of this question, Adorno accurately situates the question of the ethics of responsibility as part of the problematic inherited by Hegel. The Weberian problematic is subtly, yet vigorously, recast in Hegelian terms that go beyond the Kantian lineages mediating his conceptualization of autonomy and freedom in Negative Dialectics. For Adorno, genuine individual freedom is dialectically dependent on the freedom of the whole, and his negative dialectics reframes what is ultimately an echo of Hegel’s account of the dialectical mediation between individual and collectivity.

Nevertheless, the end result of Adorno’s formulation of this relationship remains antinomian. For the language of “collective life,” in Adorno’s view, has been hijacked by nationalism and fascism.⁵³ “Consequently,” as Gerhard Schweppenhäuser accurately points out, for Adorno “the way forward consists either of a political ethics as the basis of a normatively just, collective praxis, or, so long as this route is blocked, of the ethics of noncooperation.”⁵⁴ The latter, the ethics of noncooperation, acknowledges the impossibility of a genuine, meaningful sense of responsibility in situations of unfreedom. Hence the inadequacy of the question of responsibility as framed by the primacy of accountability that Adorno associates with “criminology:” “Are you responsible or not responsible,” a question that rings hollow once understood in solipsistic terms in a situation of unfreedom.⁵⁵ “Freedom in the sense of moral responsibility can only exist in a free society,” Adorno unequivocally suggested.⁵⁶ Responsibility, then, is only meaningful in a free society whose corollary is the absence of unfreedom and a sense of shared power: “We can only think of ourselves as responsible insofar as we are able to influence matters in the areas where we have responsibility…. Responsibility, then, is the touchstone by which freedom can be measured in reality, by which freedom can be imputed, as the lawyers put it. But if responsibility truly is the critical zone of freedom, we can say that today there is a complete mismatch between responsibility and influence” (203–4). Herein, responsibility is bounded. Its limits largely reflect the differentiations of power within a social and political order. It is circumscribed to fields or areas where “we have responsibility,” something that has to be carefully pondered and critically mapped. Adorno, then, makes explicit the Hegelian connotations of this conception of responsibility as thoroughly mediated by subjective dispositions and historical objectivity. Or as he states it, “This is that, while freedom appears to us as a subjective quality, as if the judgment about whether freedom exists is one that falls exclusively to the subjective mind, this insight enables us to see how dependent freedom is on objective realities and to gauge the extent to which we are capable of influencing the real world with its overpowered, structured institutions by what we do as formally free subjective agents” (204, emphasis added).

Thus a properly dialectical account of freedom is as crucial for his political ethic as it is for a philosophy of history. Adorno reflected on this question from the perspective of his critical materialism and the pondered refusal of abstractions that could easily revert to reification or hypostatization. In relation to these concerns, Adorno argued:

Freedom is “something social,” and unfreedom is a form of “superfluous domination,” however entrenched and sedimented as second nature the latter may be, both of which are concepts thoroughly mediated by the concrete situations in which these emerge—indeed, freedom is a problem to be dialectically elucidated (183, 201). Content and form are thus dialectically rendered. Or, as Adorno formulated it in conjunction with the question of responsibility: “For to think about mankind in terms of the contents of people’s lives would essentially be a question of responsibility, responsibility towards empirical existence, self-preservation and the fulfillment of the species to which we belong for good or ill.”⁵⁷ Even so, it is in collective, public matters where moral problems pertaining to the species at large arise. If this collective connotation is disavowed, what remains is the abstract positing of the question of freedom and determinism along the antinomian lines exposed in bourgeois morality, where “freedom as responsibility” is placed “in the service of repression.”⁵⁸ Adorno thus states what he considers the overriding concerns in ways that resonate and complement his account of moral life “after Auschwitz:” “No man should be tortured; there should be no concentration camps—while all this continues in Asia and Africa and is repressed merely because, as ever, the humanity of civilization is inhumane towards the people it shamelessly brands as uncivilized.”⁵⁹

The conclusion to Adorno’s “Freedom Model” in Negative Dialectics succinctly encompasses what is at stake in this critique of formal freedom and responsibility, as well as registers Adorno’s sense of an ethics of political responsibility at a time of political closure: “In the socialized society no individual is capable of the morality that is a social demand, but would only be a reality in a free society. Social morality would only still exist once it at last puts an end to the bad infinity of nefarious exchange. But the individual is left with no more than the morality for which Kantian ethics—which accords affection, not respect, to animals—can muster only disdain: to try to live so that one may believe himself to have been a good animal.”⁶⁰ Echoes of Brecht’s staging of the dialectic of objective and subjective ethics reverberate in these formulations. Paraphrasing one of Brecht’s assertions in Me-Ti, the Book of Changes, it is unethical to speak of ethics in a situation that is structured to deplete it of substance, for only in a different social and political order could the demands of moral obligation and legal constraints animating the best formulations of a Kantian sense of responsibility be actualized in the context of a collective sense of ethical life.⁶¹ But this is precisely what Adorno ultimately disavowed, even if the actualization of the political ethic of responsibility that emerges in his reflections demands it. Rather, he ultimately rests on noble ideas of decency and integrity that come close to pitting powerless virtue against the way of the world. In Adorno’s own formulation, “life itself 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. Indeed, I would almost go so far to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency necessarily leads almost everyone to protest.”⁶² That is Adorno’s wager, but the tepidness of the formulation tells the tale about the chances for it to bear fruit.

This wager, however, is instructive. Out of an immanent critique of it, some of the basic contours of a robust political ethic of responsibility more evidently emerge, even if it, ultimately, calls for a different stance. Adorno’s “good animal” here could be contrasted with Brecht’s stance toward the very same dialectical dilemma of political ethics, albeit one penned in the 1930s—these are St. Joan’s words, after realizing how her good acts ended up having pernicious consequences in lieu of how the situation in which she acted was structured:

This defense, however, is consistent with Adorno’s one-sided characterization of Hegel’s idea of “ethical life.” Apropos of Hegel, he writes that “what the ethics of responsibility amounts to is that existing reality—that which Hegel calls the way of the worlds [der Weltlauf], which he defends against the vanity of protesting interiority—is always in the right over against the human subject.”⁶⁶ This is so obviously wrong that it scarcely merits comment. But this formulation cannot be conflated with the totality of Adorno’s reflections about politics. Although never theorizing the political as such, his critical theory of responsibility exhibits a keen understanding of one of its constitutive dimensions: the primacy of the situation and the crucial role of theoretical re-cognition. Both constitute essential elements of any conceptualization that goes beyond the antinomy between the subjective and the objective that seems to emerge out of his misrecognition of the collective contents of ethical life and the ensuing curtailing of a substantive political ethic.⁶⁷ This truncation of his political ethic leaves Adorno vulnerable to the charge that he is arresting the movement of dialectical mediation and, by extension, leaving reflection in a state of “judged oppositions,” in this case, that between subjective and objective ethics, an opposition that while dialectically formulated ultimately arrests the dialectical moment of thinking that can lead to a conceptualization of ethical life and the political forms and institutions actualizing it.⁶⁸ Nonetheless, this hardly leads Adorno to a neo-Kantian fossilization of the antinomian nature of this opposition. It emerges out of Adorno’s response to his historical situation, one scarcely removed twenty years from the Nazi past. Adorno’s partial disavowal of the political ethic, a necessary corollary of the primacy of ethical life over individualist morality within the dialectical legacy, is historical through and through.

How and why this particular antinomy is best recast as a historically mediated contradiction in the architecture of Adorno’s critical theory is best grasped in one of his very last essays, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in which he confronted the dialectic of theory and praxis in close proximity to the predicaments of power mediating the West German political situation of the late sixties. What this text, and the different conceptual movements and mediations staged in it, reveals is Adorno’s real struggle with these mediations, which, in turn, suggests that these contradictions are symptoms of a historical impasse. Furthermore, by way of his articulation of the dialectic of theory and practice, he reflects upon one of the central questions of any political ethic, the intersection between means/ends in political life, with unexpected results. Early on in the text, Adorno revisits the question of the relationship between subjective and objective, but this time he casts it in more recognizable philosophical terms by way of juxtaposing Kant and Hegel: namely, as the perennial dialectic of the universal and the particular, the individual and the community. While Kant’s enlightened morality is individualist, namely, a moral philosophy for which “the individual” is “the substrate of correct—that is, for Kant, radically reasonable—action,” Hegel’s conception of ethical life completely reframes the question. “Hegel in effect dissolves the concept of the moral by extending it to the political. Since then no unpolitical reflection upon praxis can be valid anymore.”⁶⁹ Even while tacitly recognizing how the Hegelian formulation entails a speculative recasting of the intersection between ethics and politics—one that in Hegelian, Hegelian-Marxist, and Marxist thought has sometimes been conceived as a political ethic, as opposed to an ethical politics—Adorno levels a familiar charge against Hegel (one that elsewhere he has formulated with great power and acuity): in Hegel “the political extension of the concept of praxis introduces the repression of the particular by the universal.”⁷⁰ Thus, once again, Adorno articulates a Kantian holdout that cuts off a fuller articulation of ethical life and its forms and how a properly dialectical mediation between individual and collective need not entail the repression of the particular.

Implicit here is Adorno’s contention that in Hegel the particular is ultimately reduced to a particularity of the universal.⁷¹ However, in these formulations Adorno comes extremely close to hypostatizing the individual qua particular and thus truncating the movement of negative dialectics. “Humanness,” Adorno acerbically argues, “which does not exist without individuation, is being virtually re-canted by the latter’s [Hegel’s] snotty-nosed [schnöselige] casual dismissal. But once the action of the individual, and therefore of all individuals, is made contemptible, then collective action is likewise paralyzed.”⁷² Here Adorno overshoots his target. His own account of the dialectical mediation of objective and subjective ethics attests the need for collective agencies beyond his abstract denunciation of Hegel, which in the Phenomenology of Spirit is far from rendering the individual standpoint contemptible tout court. All the same, this seems like a damning verdict on Hegel, not least in its barely concealed contempt for what Adorno takes to be Hegel’s cavalier dismissal of the individual. But, as Adorno notes in the sentence that immediately follows it, the critique of both moments hardly leads to any transhistorical condemnation of the ineluctability of a political ethic that could be actualized only in conditions of freedom and equality. Ultimately, it suggests a historical impasse, the limits of a particular historical moment: that is, a historically mediated contradiction, one that if cast as merely an antinomy conceals its historicity and historically determined nature. Its sediments. Or, as he formulates the historical contradiction,

Spontaneity appears to be trivial at the outset in the face of the factual supremacy of the objective conditions. Kant’s moral philosophy and Hegel’s philosophy of right represent two dialectical stages of the bourgeois self-consciousness of praxis. Polarized according to the dichotomy of the particular and the universal that tears apart this consciousness, both philosophies are false. Each justifies itself against the other so long as a possible higher form of praxis does not reveal itself in reality; its revelation requires theoretical reflection. It is beyond doubt and controversy that a reasoned analysis of the situation is the precondition for political praxis at least.⁷³

In a moment of defeat, and epochal neutralization, the locus for responsible action immediately consists of rigorous reflection upon this condition, its sources as well as its fissures, especially in an age of defeat and closure characterized by modalities of domination: bureaucratization in the East and capitalist standardization and reification in the West.⁷⁴ A measured grasp of the situation was for Adorno indispensable for a political praxis aiming at its eventual transformation, and this often involves nothing less than fulfilling the vocation of critical theory in the realm of representation, as theory emerging out of concrete contacts with the objective historical situation and, by extension, transcending it in thought as a precondition for actualizing its historical transcendence. And, in a situation of political neutralization and epochal closure, it is imperative to resist idealizations or embellishments of what is and refuse to relent on critical thinking. By the same token, it was politically illiterate to dismiss the modicum of democracy that, in Adorno’s case, West Germany’s Federal Republic represented in terms of recent German history. Hence the overwhelmingly defensive politics that defined Adorno’s intellectual and political praxis in the sixties, yet a carefully calibrated, and thus temporary, defensive politics that refused to acquiesce to the predicament of power.

One of Fredric Jameson’s formulations can be invoked here to shed light on this question:

Of the antinomies, perhaps we can conclude…that their ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference is to be attributed to a blocked mechanism, whereby in our own episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction, as they seemed able to do in other moments of the past (and not only in the Hegelian dialectic). If so, the blockage can only have something to do with the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change…for us time consists of an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages.⁷⁵

How high are the stakes when thinking about the importance of historicizing the situation, including thinking historically about the relative powerlessness of theory and praxis in the face of larger, objective, historical trends, is adduced in Adorno’s scathing rendering of what he considers to be the deformation of spontaneity at the hands of actionism [Aktionismus]. These formulations simultaneously betray Adorno’s frustration with the actionism of the student movement and his commitment to a historically mediated, and thus contextual, reckoning with the situation, as he makes no bones about the impoverishment of theory once it is entirely severed from a political praxis, and vice versa. Theory certainly owes fidelity to praxis in order to live up to its critical vocation, but that actually entails resisting the imperatives to unreflective praxis. Here is Adorno’s rendering:

The transition to a praxis without theory is motivated by the objective impotence of theory and exponentially increases that impotence through the isolation and fetishization of the subjective element of historical movement, spontaneity. The deformation of spontaneity should be seen as a reaction to the administered world. But by frantically closing its eyes to the totality and by behaving as though it stems immediately from people, spontaneity falls in line with the objective tendency of progressive dehumanization: even in its practices. Spontaneity, which would be animated by the neediness of the object, should attach itself to the vulnerable places of rigidified reality, where the ruptures caused by the pressures of rigidification appear externally; it should not thrash about indiscriminately, abstractly, without any consideration of the contents of what is often attacked merely for the sake of publicity.⁷⁷

Several themes can be teased out of this set of formulations, but for the purposes of the present discussion exploring three suffices. First, notice the uncharitable and ultimately inaccurate depiction of the German situation that the last clause of the last formulation conveys, one of several that say a lot about Adorno’s own political temperament, the fallibility of his political judgment. Second, and what is most important at this point: irrespective of the unsoundness of some of his local judgments, these formulations state and perform the form of re-cognition that his critical theory defends. This is clearly grasped by how, in a fine dialectical reversal of the received terms of discussion, actionism, which is presumably more objective than the purportedly ethereal contemplation of critical theory, turns out to be subjectivist, while critical theory emerges as closer to the objectivity of the historical situation. And these are not mere conceptual pirouettes. On the contrary, these formulations articulate what lies at the core of Adorno’s argument, the objective and subjective mediation of both theory and practice and how critical theory as negative dialectics provides the most adequate conceptual armature to forge a realist political ethic. Indeed, it is in light of his own critical theory that one can not only critically undermine and debunk Adorno’s own conceits but also denounce the lack of realism of actionism and its moralizing impulses. Third, witness the ways in which he grasps the totality, and by extension its determinations, through concentrated thinking, alert and thus attentive to objective needs and the vulnerable places of the totality as grasped in the actual situation—attention and concentration that further seek to be responsive to suffering, by thinking as best he could of finding ways to lend a voice to suffering, as well as to the conditions of its amelioration. Yet vulnerability is articulated politically; for what is at stake here is not a hypostatized vulnerability of the subject, but the objective points of vulnerability of the structure of power as such. Insofar as Adorno seeks to articulate both forms of vulnerability—that of the system and that of socially mediated and historically constituted vulnerable individuals and groups—he is able to articulate some of the broad contours of a political ethic, or at least part of its conceptual, critical, and cognitive armature.

Re-cognizing the situation, its structure and coordinates, is crucial for genuine political action. Adorno unequivocally writes: “An analysis of the situation is not tantamount to conformity to that situation. In reflecting upon the situation, analysis emphasizes the aspects that might be able to lead beyond the given constraints of the situation.”⁷⁸ This imperative to map the situation as accurately as possible is intrinsic to a realist disposition that unexpectedly emerges in a thinker so often chided for political aloofness. A mapping that is constitutive of his version of an economy of violence: whereas Adorno avows violence in the context of waging war against counterrevolutionary fascism for the sake of an alternative order, he contended that violence had lost validity in the West German context of the late sixties.⁷⁹ The contours of this realist disposition can be further grasped in his discussion of the dialectic of means and ends and how this has become distorted in a world so dominated by the imperatives of instrumental reason.⁸⁰ Equally troublesome to him is the autonomization of means: the nightmarish spectacle of “actionism,” a political practice in which means are severed from ends.⁸¹ In this way, Adorno’s critique does not disavow the dialectic of means/ends. Instead, what he places under severe criticism is the extreme autonomization of means that comes out of the attempt to fulfill ends without concentrated reflection, a form of unreflective practice in which means overwhelm ends or supplant them altogether. But Adorno treads carefully and avoids abstract pacifism, with its inevitable contradictions, as he refuses to idealize violence. Only a reckoning with the situation and its imperatives, its openings and closures, can decide the recourse to violence.⁸²

It is in this vein that conceptualizing the relationship between ends/means along the lines of his dialectical critical theory becomes constitutive of the practice of political responsibility in the new German predicament after World War II. How does Adorno recast this dialectic? He does so by reintroducing ends to the realm of rationality, along the lines of the philosophical anthropology sketched in Dialectic of Enlightenment. According to the minimalist humanism formulated in these exilic philosophical fragments, rationality is intimately conjoined with self-preservation. By extension, Adorno argues, rationality cannot relinquish the preservation of humanity or “simply be split off from” it.⁸³ From this perspective, humanity’s preservation is an ineluctable controlling end that is historical, through and through, and not an abstract invocation of historicity. Drenched in history, it is an argument that risks fallibility but avoids hypostatization. It also firmly grounds Adorno’s critique of the instrumental as part of the effort to objectify an emancipated rational society.⁸⁴ The commitment to humanity emerges as an end to which rational means need to respond, a concrete universal utterly mediated by particular situations and their constitutive predicaments of power. And the dialectic between the two avows the primacy of the situation and how the relationship between theory and praxis conforms to how the latter is structured. Clearly, there are no guarantees; nor can self-preservation by reified.⁸⁵ If left unchecked, self-preservation can lead to the establishment of “society itself as a vast joint-stock company for the exploitation of nature.”⁸⁶ Still, certain political questions are ultimately put aside in Adorno’s account: for instance, that of how to politically actualize, or make good on emancipated self-preservation, its political-ethical corollaries, sociological basis, and political contents. Without addressing these questions, his realist recasting of violence, means and ends, remains limited. Overall, the limits of Adorno’s political ethic largely stem from his neglect to theorize political forms, to dialectically conceptualize the political level of the totality his conceptual constellation re-cognizes. But this is not a hypostatized antinomian stance; rather, it amounts to a contradiction. Symptomatically, the discussion ends with a rather tenuous invocation of Hegelian “ethical life,” even when Adorno ultimately refused to conceptualize ethical life and other realms of collective power where any form of political action takes place.⁸⁷

Elsewhere, Adorno cogently articulated his understanding of critical theory as a form of practice, even if he never conceived of it as a substitute for genuine political praxis. Critical theory is a form of praxis in the realm of representation; there it has a pedagogical function it fulfills by cultivating forms of education and political literacy vigilant of the forms of power mediating, if not enacting, practices of domination and exploitation. His guiding conviction is the relentlessness of dialectical critique. An activity that demanded from him critical distance at a moment of political closure:

Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn’t break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility. Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. The utopian moment in thinking is stronger the less it—this too a form of relapse—objectifies itself into a utopia and hence sabotages its realization. Open thinking points beyond itself. For its part a comportment, a form of praxis, it is more akin to transformative praxis than a comportment that is compliant for the sake of praxis.⁸⁸

Adorno’s critical theory never amounted to a sustained reflection on political life, let alone political forms. Even so, the foregoing discussion makes clear how one-sided the presentation of Adorno as a thinker who offers “Beckett and Schoenberg as the solution to world starvation and threatened nuclear destruction” actually is.⁸⁹ Rather, for Adorno, the aesthetic provided a realm where the somatic aspect of re-cognizing suffering could be apprehended.⁹⁰ Adorno has thus bequeathed a conceptually bound account of the dialectical legacy that is a formidable point of departure for the re-cognition of contemporary predicaments of power. The challenge is thus one of dialectically conceptualizing both subjective re-cognition and political forms that would allow for a truly emancipated humanity—political forms and critical orientations defined by a sense of critical fidelity. At the level of the subject, the stakes of this immanent transcendence are memorably formulated in Minima Moralia, “Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means,” an attempt devoid of guarantees—for “it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character: the ruse of reason would like to hold sway over the dialectic too”—of arresting the compulsions of instrumental reason’s coercion by way of the bindingness of critical reason.⁹¹ The primacy of the object entails moving away from this grip, a step that would dialectically recast and render concrete Karl Kraus’s aphorism “Origin is the goal.”⁹² In this genuinely new origin a broader politics, which always encompasses a defensive moment but also an offensive politics, could be actualized.