Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

4. Idiosyncrasies: Of Anti-Semitism

c h a p t e r 4 Idiosyncrasies: Of Anti-Semitism Jan Plug I The often brutal condemnation of contemporary society in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is founded at least in part on their understanding of the devastating consequences of domination, including, but not limited to, that described by the determination of the subject by the economic. Thus, while an interrogation of the status of the subject by the various approaches that have (unhappily) been grouped together under the title of ‘‘post-structuralism’’ is frequently accused of denying any stable ground upon which to make ethicopolitical decisions, and while a strain of contemporary theory increasingly speaks for the ‘‘social construction ’’ of the subject (in terms of race, class, and gender, for instance, but not only these), the promise of social theory for Horkheimer and Adorno would seem, paradoxically, to invoke a certain understanding of the individual .1 For ‘‘today the operation of the economic apparatus demands that the masses be directed without any intervention from individuation,’’2 and ‘‘[a]ccordance with reality and adaptation to power are no longer the results of a dialectical process between the subject and reality, but are produced directly by the cogwheel mechanism of industry.’’3 With even 52 53 Jan Plug thought taken up in the division of labor and made to work in and for it, ‘‘the whole man has become the subject-object of repression.’’4 It would appear from these statements that any possibility of liberation from repression would entail jamming up the cogwheel mechanism of industry . It is a question, then, of the specific historical situation and engagements of Dialectic of Enlightenment, of domination as the threat of fascism and capitalism alike. The thrust of Horkheimer and Adorno’s response, which is to say the promise their thought holds for an emancipation both in and of that history, necessarily marks the meeting place of conceptuality and politics. But this means that it cannot be a case of an historical determination of philosophical thought or of consciousness more generally, any more than, in a more idealist mode, conceptuality can be said to determine reality. To be sure, the confrontation is fully dialectical. But this is a dialectics that exposes and names itself as such. When it does so, when, in its dialectic of conceptuality and politics, Dialectic of Enlightenment thinks itself as dialectic, it exposes its own conceptual mechanisms as politics—its movement in and engagement with history. According to Horkheimer and Adorno’s formulations, a relation to history seems to offer the possibility of interrupting the economic, social, and political process of domination to the extent that it allows to emerge an individual capable of being just that, an individual. But would such an individual have to issue from individuality, from a position outside this very totalizing determination of ‘‘the whole man’’? If so, then this central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is caught in the very cogwheel it describes . For if the individual is already fully dominated, then anything he5 could produce, including a thought that would allow him or others to emerge as individuals, is already inevitably a product and perpetuation of the socioeconomic apparatus. And this means that the thought of individuality , Horkheimer and Adorno’s own thought, would itself be in the service of that same totalizing system. If, however, an outside to this system remains a possibility, then the individual is not the determination of economic forces, and the argument for individuation loses much of its force— for the individual has his place as an individual. In this case, Horkheimer and Adorno’s call for individuation, in contrast to the cogwheel they describe , serves as evidence for the possibility—and in fact the existence—of an outside to the system of repression.6 According to the dialectical logic of this scenario, the possibility of an outside to repression is at once a confirmation of the totalizing force of domination (which allows for the outside in order to recuperate it, in effect denying its exteriority) and its 54 Idiosyncrasies: Of Anti-Semitism negation (the outside is truly outside and remains irrecuperable). Within the historical situation of fascist and capitalist modernism, the economic and cultural forces need not appear as totalizing as this logic might suggest. Individuals need not be fully adapted to the economic, but merely enough for the economic to overcome their resistance as individuals. Similarly, not...