Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity

Introduction

Since the late 1960s, during which time various strains of poststructuralism and critical theory’s linguistic turn have largely demarcated the field in continental philosophy, there has really been only one point of agreement among the preponderance of continental philosophers— namely, that any philosophical approach beginning with “the subject” is utterly flawed. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, for instance, Habermas roundly attacks Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, and Derrida on a variety of grounds, but not once does he attack their rejection of the subject, which he, too, simply takes for granted. Peter Dews thus rightly declares: One of the least noted features of the strife between Habermas and his postmodern opponents over the “philosophical discourse of modernity” is the number of assumptions which both sides share in common, despite the energy of the arguments between them. Habermas and his critics coincide in the view—ultimately derived from Heidegger—that the history of philosophy is susceptible to an epochal analysis, and that the era of the philosophy of the subject, which is also the culminating era of metaphysical thinking, is currently drawing to a close. Indeed, it is remarkable that The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity gives the celebrated account of the “death of man” in Foucault’s The Order of Things, viewed as a post-mortem on the monological subject, almost unqualified endorsement.1 As early as the 1980s, however, there were indications, albeit not explicitly thematized, that continental philosophy could not purge itself of the subject quite so easily. The third volume of Foucault’s series on human sexuality, The Care of the Self, raised more than a few eyebrows 1 Introduction because of its emphasis on aesthetic self-constitution, which, on the face of it, seems to sharply conflict not only with the “death of man” in The Order of Things but also with the conclusions of The History of Sexuality, the first volume of the series. It is by no means clear that Foucault’s rejection of the “repressive hypothesis” in The History of Sexuality—that is, Foucault’s rejection of the view that social power relations (however abhorrent their constitution) repress rather than productively constitute the subject—can be reconciled with his later turn toward what certain Foucault scholars call “practical subjectivity.”2 So, too, in “Force of Law,” Derrida declares that “it goes without saying” that deconstruction has always been “through and through, at least obliquely [a] discourse on justice,” and he then proceeds to ground this discourse by speaking of “freedom,” “a sense of responsibility without limits,” “an epoche of the rule,” and the inexorable but hopelessly opaque nature of “the decision,”3 all of which are associated with the subject. This is a far cry from Derrida ’s influential essay, “The Ends of Man,” in which such notions are, by all appearances, summarily rejected. Finally, even as he continued to reject “the philosophy of the subject” in its diverse incarnations, Habermas turned to Kierkegaard, whose philosophy is perhaps the epitome of the “monological” subjectivity that Habermas rejects, for the purpose of enlisting his existential recalcitrance in opposition to identity formations engendered by flawed forms of communicative interaction. It would seem, then, that if the subject is only the residuum of a washed out metaphysical tradition, it is nevertheless a residuum in which, at least in some sense, its detractors continue to believe.4 For good reason, then, in recent years the question of the subject has been explicitly raised anew. As Slavoj Zizek aptly puts it in the opening sentence of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, “a specter is haunting Western Academia . . . the spectre of the Cartesian subject.”5 As the book’s subtitle appropriately suggests, the subject is an ineliminable component of all political projects, or at least, I would argue, political projects that are motivated by the aim of ameliorating the existing state of affairs for human beings. Without a commitment to efficacious subjects—a commitment whose very possibility is being progressively undermined by a polity that is ever more constructed in the circuits of contemporary “postmodern” capitalist globalization processes—there can be no basis for change, and this only plays into the hands of those groups that most profit from the prevailing order of things. Spurred by this insight, there have been, in addi2 SARTRE AND ADORNO tion to Zizek, a number of philosophers who have sought to revivify the notion of the subject, but...