Things Beyond Resemblance by Robert Hullot-Kentor

Author:Robert Hullot-Kentor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics, PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

II

An essay whose motive is its alliance with two cars traveling south—and especially with one of them—can itself move decisively in that direction by pointing out that there is only one reason to be all that interested in Adorno’s work. This reason is generally recognized by those who are familiar with the work, but it is not always stated clearly: No other contemporary philosophy is able to set its finger with such precision, so unwaveringly, on the content of this historical moment. A question worth answering then is, how is it able to do this? There is more to say on this point than can be said here. But some approach to the question is gained if this philosophy’s view of history, presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is considered. That work was itself conceived in a desperate effort in the 1940s to understand why history, instead of progressing, regresses. This speaks directly to our contemporary moment where Americans—certainly—sense themselves entering primitive times, socially, under the great velocity of that nation’s weaponry.

But even a brief presentation of the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment must be prefaced with a heavy caveat. If this work especially deserves to draw the attention of students of Adorno in the United States, its study will at many turns demonstrate that it is faulty and limited in many ways: its analysis of the ultimate convergence of domination with fascism, for instance, is undiscerning in that fascism, whatever traces it has had in the United States, has never been a substantial threat because a country that knows itself to be made up exclusively of immigrants cannot participate in an institutionalized fantasy of the nation as a primordial family. Simply compare the rebarbative idea of “homeland” in “homeland security” with the German heimat or the French patrie. Likewise, Americans cannot guess at the strictures of formal paternal authoritarianism known directly to the generations of the Kaiserreich into which Adorno was born, a tradition of authority later usurped by Nazism. Just to discover what a handshake once meant in those contexts would require from most North Americans some amount of cultural-anthropological study. And regardless of comparative national perspectives and mores, Dialectic of Enlightenment was written under such desperate pressure to comprehend the regressive force of enlightenment that in the pages of that text—as the authors were aware—enlightenment itself becomes difficult to understand as a value.

With the expectation, then, that there is much to question in the work, the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment—by its nature only partially stateable at any one point—is that history regresses because progress, as the progress of domination, is sacrificial. Sacrifice is shown to be a logic of substitution that develops as the principle of identity—the impulse of self-preservation itself—in an ever broadening web of the exchange relation. The exchange relation generically consumes the particular while the principle of identity constantly hides from view the sacrificial mayhem at the interior of the process. Reality is thus mastered while the purpose of mastery, the possible satisfaction of the particular, is squandered.

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