The Warrior’s Subjectivity

“The philosophical emphasis on the constitutive power of the subjective element always also closes off the truth. Thus certain animal species, such as the dinosaur Triceratops and the rhinoceros carry along their armour, which protects them, as a prison, which—to speak anthropomorphically—they in vain try to get rid of. The imprisonment in the apparatus of survival might explain the particular ferociousness of rhinoceroses as well as the unadmitted and therefore all the more terrifying ferociousness of homo sapiens.”

(Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

The above quotation appears in Rainer Nägele’s 1983 essay “The Scene of the Other: Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic In The Context of Poststructuralism.”¹ Within the framework of Adorno’s critique of subjectivity, the anthropomorphic images in the passage serve to illustrate the link between existential imprisonment and a human aggressivity that is “all the more terrifying” because “unadmitted.” The constitutive power of the subject is indebted to the faculty of reason. Reason enables the subject to gain control over its instincts and as such serves as a tool of liberation, affording the exercise of choice over whether and how to react to internal forces. However, in exercising control over instinct, reason partakes of the very logic of domination characteristic of the natural world from which it seeks to differentiate itself. The subject who, through reason, endeavors to control nature thus remains defined by, and confined within, its limits. Citing Adorno, Nägele calls attention to the inscription of reason within the laws of nature: “‘The primacy of subjectivity continues in spiritualized form the Darwinian struggle for survival. The oppression of nature for human purposes is a mere natural relationship; therefore the superiority of reason as domination over nature and its principle: appearance’” (71). Nägele comments: “In other words: the very principle of domination over nature is in fact the ensnarement in it; the seeming transcendence of reason above nature, its blind tribute to it. Thus the qualities which the development of subjectivity brings forth are already its subversion. ‘That which objectivated itself from and against pure reflexes in human beings: character or will, the potential organ of freedom, subverts freedom because it embodies the principle of domination, to which human beings progressively subject themselves’” (71).

Adorno’s negative dialectic seeks to reclaim the objectified and objectifying subject through a “reflective displacement and transformation of that which constitutes subjectivity” (70). Given that the constitution of the subject is inseparable from (its) domination—the I ‘objectivates’ itself through this principle—the only way to conceptualize freedom without replicating this domination is to identify an alterity within the subject that is not bound up in this logic. Nägele writes, “The promise of freedom, attached by the enlightenment to the autonomous self and I, moves away from the I to its other: ‘The dawning consciousness of freedom nourishes itself on the memory of an archaic impulse not yet governed by a definite I ….Without the anamnesis of an unconstrained, pre-ego impulse which later is banned into the zone of unfree bondage of nature, the idea of freedom could not be created’” (71). Nägele emphasizes how Adorno retains a notion of the strengthening of the “I,” but in a form that does not link freedom to the subject’s appropriation of the place of the other. Rather, “‘the subject has to make good for what it has done to the non-identical. In doing that it becomes free of the appearance of its absolute being-for-itself’” (70). “Making good” consists in rendering legible the non-identical within the subject that manifests itself through the very impulse to dominate and upon which the subject is dependent, notwithstanding the illusion of its autonomy. Associated with aesthetic production, Nägele understands “making good paradoxically, as a liquification, a playfulness which, in one of his better moments, Schiller dreamt of in his aesthetics as the true essence of human beings, who are truly human only when they play” (71).

Nägele’s presentation of the subject’s entrapment in the logic of domination is situated within his exploration of modes of philosophical...