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Against False Universals
Seyla Benhabib’s 2024 Adorno Prize lecture.
On September 11, Seyla Benhabib was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt, whose past laureates have included Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. This is an abridged version of the lecture Benhabib delivered in German on that occasion.
I.
I first arrived in Frankfurt, in this city of immigrants and exiles, in the fall of 1980, as a foreign student and scholar whose life was forever changed by her encounter with it. In Frankfurt I met brilliant friends and scholars from all over the world who gathered in Jürgen Habermas’s “Doktoranden-Kolloquium” on Monday evenings in the old Department of Philosophy on Dantestrasse—alas, a building which no longer exists! In Frankfurt, I also learned about many famous intellectuals whose lives intersected for various periods in this city of migrants, among them none other than Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno.
Any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted from the start by the profound dislike which Arendt in particular seems to have borne towards Adorno. In 1929 Adorno was among members of the faculty of the University of Frankfurt who would be evaluating Arendt’s first husband Günther Anders’s habilitation. Adorno found the work unsatisfactory, thus bringing to an end Anders’s hopes for a university career. It is also in this period that Arendt’s notorious statement regarding Adorno—“Der kommt uns nicht ins Haus,” meaning that Adorno was not to set foot in their apartment in Frankfurt—was uttered.
This hostility on Arendt’s part never diminished, while Adorno encountered it with a cultivated politesse. Arendt’s temper flared up several more times at Adorno: first, when she was wrongly convinced that Adorno and his colleagues were preventing the publication of Walter Benjamin’s posthumous manuscripts, and secondly, when Adorno’s critique of Heidegger—The Jargon of Authenticity—appeared in 1964.
Of course, such attitudes and personal animosities cannot guide our evaluations of a thinker’s work and legacy. This is particularly true in the case of Arendt and Adorno, who not only reflected upon the “break in civilization” (Zivilisationsbruch) caused by the rise of fascism and Nazism, the Holocaust, and the defeat of the working classes in Europe and elsewhere, but asked, “What does it mean to go on thinking?” after all that. They shared a profound sense that one must learn to think anew, beyond the traditional schools of philosophy and methodology. It is this attempt to think anew that I will refer to as their “Benjaminian moment.”
Put succinctly: Arendt as well as Adorno believed that thinking must free itself from the power of false universals. This means not only refuting historical teleologies, but at a much deeper level, it involves a categorical critique of all philosophical attempts at totalizing and system-building. For Arendt, honest thinking can only be accomplished in fragmentary constellations that bring together historical, cultural, and socioeconomic trends that converge at certain moments in history, but all of which could have happened otherwise. For Adorno, thinking must resist the temptation to overpower the object, letting it instead appear and assert itself over and against the epistemic imperialism of subjectivity. Such Adornian concepts as “natural history” (Naturgeschichte) and “the primacy of the object” are nodal points around which the legacy and influence of Walter Benjamin are revealed.
II.
On May 7, 1931, upon assuming a position in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Frankfurt, Adorno held a lecture with the title “The Actuality of Philosophy.” The opening statement of this text indicates the militant rigor with which the young professor is ready to take on the establishment of philosophy:
Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real . . . only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality. (my italics)
Since the left-Hegelian critique by Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels of Hegel’s phrase “that the actual is rational; and that the rational is actual,” faith in the capacity of reason to “grasp the totality of the real” was shown to be a chimera at best and an ideology at worst. Following this tradition, Adorno is not only criticizing the hubris of philosophical thought but also indicating that “the real” itself “suppresses every claim to reason.” This failure of philosophy does not stem from the thinker alone but is the fault of a reality that does not permit itself to be grasped as rational. “Only in traces and ruins,” writes Adorno, introducing a phrase from Benjamin, wholly unknown to philosophical discourse of the time, can a “correct and just reality” be encountered.
Turning to Heidegger and the question of Being, which calls itself the most “radical” form of thought, Adorno observes “that Heidegger falls back precisely on the latest plan for a subjective ontology produced by Western thinking: the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.” Drawing a suggestive parallel between Kierkegaard’s leap into faith and the Heideggerian resolve unto death, Adorno then observes: “However, a leap and an undialectical negation of subjective being is also Heidegger’s ultimate justification . . . and . . . recognizes solely the transcendence of a vitalist ‘thus being’ [Sosein] in death.”
Writing in 1931, before Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and assumed the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1933, forever casting a shadow on his standing as a philosopher, Adorno does not uncover the possible links between Heidegger’s existential ontology of death and anxiety and his Nazi politics. The categories of thrownness, anxiety, and death, in Adorno’s view, “are in fact not able to banish the fullness of what is living,” but they swing between an irrational exuberance for the “pure concept of ‘life’” and feelings of dread and anxiety faced with the finitude of Dasein.
Adorno’s magisterial survey of the history and actuality of philosophy results in his rejection of “the power of thought to grasp the totality of the real,” and he concludes: “Plainly put: the idea of science is research; that of philosophy is interpretation. . . . philosophy persistently, and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without possessing a sure key to interpretation.” (My emphasis.)
III.
Undoubtedly, between the 1931 essay on “The Actuality of Philosophy” and the 1937 programmatic essay written by Max Horkheimer on “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which announced the general direction of a critical theory of society, Adorno’s own thinking underwent transformations, but he never accepted the view of history as emancipation through social labor, as subscribed to in the Marxist tradition. Instead, he turned philosophy’s search for the totality into a materialist critique of an irrational reality. This was a materialism which did not celebrate human beings’ transformation of nature; rather, it was a materialism which mourned the passing away of the “recollection of nature” in the subject.
The text in which a new paradigm of critical theory, breaking away from crucial Marxian theses, was most explicitly developed is Dialectic of Enlightenment. Completed in 1944, it was published three years later in Amsterdam and reissued in Germany first as an unauthorized facsimile in 1969. It contains in nuce the position of the Frankfurt School after the European catastrophe. My generation of critical theorists (we are the third, I believe) spent much time parsing the break with Marxism which this text announced, and we asked ourselves where critical theory was headed after this.
Let me briefly recall the aporia of the Dialectic of Enlightenment: that the history of humanity’s relation to nature does not unfold an emancipatory dynamic as Marx would have us believe. The development of the forces of production, humanity’s increased mastery over nature, is not accompanied by a diminishing of interpersonal domination; to the contrary, the more rationalized the domination of nature becomes, the harder it is to recognize societal domination which itself seems to become increasingly natural, that is, in the sense of being objective and without alternatives. The Marxian view of a possible transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom as a result of the development of the forces of production is an illusion. It is a false universal.
Although at one time these theses seemed to express a relentless pessimism embedded in a negative philosophy of history which extended from the story of Odysseus to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, in the age of the Anthropocene they appear astute and clairvoyant. The irreversible impact of industrial-technological civilization upon nature is no longer a contested claim; disagreement exists among scientists only about when and how tipping points occur beyond which certain climactic conditions become irreversible. In fact, even concepts such as “natural history” reveal insights consistent with contemporary theories. Natural history does not mean the history of nature, as can be found in geology books about the earth’s formation, or in geography books about the changing of frontiers, coastlines, and mountains. Adorno writes: “The question of natural history is . . . that of the inner composition of elements of nature and elements of history within history itself.”
Compare Adorno’s concept of Naturgeschichte with the thinking of Bruno Latour, one of the most important thinkers of the Anthropocene. The Terrestrial, writes Latour, is “in fact limited in a surprising way to a minuscule zone a few kilometers thick between the atmosphere and bedrock. A biofilm, a varnish, a skin, a few infinitely folded layers.” This “critical zone” makes life on planet Earth possible, and it is the destruction of this zone that the heating of the surface of the earth threatens. I don’t think that Adorno would have been surprised by any of this.
Yet if the contemporary climate change crisis and the new Earth sciences lend a new relevance and poignancy to Adorno’s rejection of emancipation through social labor, and if, as I have argued, for Adorno, the task of philosophy is not to build totalizing systems but to engage in materialist interpretation and reveal fragmentary constellations, where does this leave social philosophy? As is well known, Adorno turns to aesthetic theory and the concept of the “naturally beautiful,” viewing it as an allegory and a cipher which intimates the utopian longing toward the non-identical. It would be too simple to criticize Adorno, as is often done, for turning away from the political and for reducing the emancipatory claims of critical theory to aesthetics. Adorno, who more consistently than other critical theorists saw the deficiencies of the Marxist paradigm, could offer no alternative to it. Yet there are elements in Adorno’s thinking, such as his critique of false universals and of identitarian thought, which may lead us beyond what Albrecht Wellmer, in his Adorno Prize lecture, called “the homelessness of the political” in Adorno’s theory.
IV.
The critique of identity thinking begins with Adorno’s lifelong and formidable preoccupation with Hegel. Hegel’s understanding of freedom as “being-by-oneself-in-otherness” follows from the supremacy of thought over being. In world history Spirit reduces otherness to a vehicle in which it can contemplate itself, and despite all departures form Hegel’s idealism, Marx follows this program. Adorno clarifies that his own position is “not that an identity rules which also contains non-identity, but non-identity is a non-identity of the identical and the non-identical.” Non-identity does not permit totalization; it can only be captured in constellations. For Adorno such constellations present the “negative universals” in which human beings are embedded; such universals have a material dimension and signify the non-identical which dominates and ensnares, rather than emancipates, them.
Adorno’s critique of identity thinking, his emphasis on fragmentation, and his rejection of any teleology of history have sometimes been interpreted in the light of postmodernist thought such as Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. Jacques Derrida has read Adorno’s critique of identity as a form of messianic materialism which excludes the drawing of forbidden images but which is nonetheless characterized by a longing toward the wholly other. In an impressive new study, Peter Gordon has rejected these readings and reconstructed the sources of normativity in Adorno’s thought positively as “a world in which happiness or human flourishing would at last be realized.”
By contrast, I am going to read Adorno’s critique of identitarianism politically, as an anti-authoritarian moment, which has normative implications for the project of a critical theory of society. Adorno insists that the false universals of world history, the nation, and the tribe ought never conquer the individual, the particular, the other—in short, they must remain and retain a moment of difference. However, just being different is a simple abstraction; in dialectical thought everything is the same and yet different. But in what does the “otherness of the other” consist? We can only achieve such understanding through encounters with the other that permit the other to communicate her otherness without exoticism and estrangement. In other words, it is in the medium of communicative interaction that the other can transcend mere difference and become the non-identical.
In one of his few definitions of utopia Adorno writes: “Utopia would be the non-identity of the subject that would not be sacrificed.” I am suggesting that we think of this moment of non-identity not only in communicative terms and as a “struggle for recognition.” As opposed to reconciliation and recognition, I want to insist on the democratic potential of the non-identical as a political struggle, as a struggle against closure and against rigid definitions of who we are or ought to be.
V.
With the rise of European fascism and Nazism, the critique of false universals and ontological certainties assumed an urgent moral and political dimension. The “authoritarian personality” type is one who is incapable of evaluating individuals and circumstances without being imprisoned by rigid categories and who singularly lacks the capacity for good judgment. These types of personalities submit their will as well as their judgment to those higher than themselves while demeaning those who stand in a position of social inferiority to them. Such personalities are prone to paranoia in that they project their own aggressive feelings toward individuals whom they then claim to be hostile to themselves, who want their destruction and the like. Anti-Semitism, argued Adorno and Horkheimer, was based on such complex processes of projection and paranoia and aimed at the destruction of the non-identical, of those who resisted becoming like oneself, of those who insisted on their otherness.
Yet is a democratic culture possible without the ability to accept the non-identity of the other, by wanting to eliminate and crush the other and by wanting her to become so integrated that her otherness wholly disappears? Whereas fascism whips up, encourages, and feeds on these feelings of paranoia, projection, and hatred of the other, democratic culture has slid into a public parade of false universals on the one hand and identitarianism on the other. Caught between the dynamics of an ever-accelerating financialized global capitalism, an aging population, the recurrence of war on the European continent for the first time since the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, and rising economic precarity fueled by technological changes, Europe’s nations have reinvented the false universals of the true nation, a nation unsullied by migrants and asylum seekers, by strangers who seem to pose dangers to secularism, to women’s freedom, to freedom of the arts and pornography.
From the Muhammed caricature controversies to the wearing of the hijab by Muslim girls and women, Europe has been convulsed by a Kulturkampf against Islam. The French Republic just recently “dodged the bullet” in the round of elections conducted on July 7, 2024, and the Rassemblement Nationale, whose representatives would forbid even French citizens with migrant backgrounds from assuming positions in government, was denied a parliamentary majority. Spurred on by false information and blind rage, crowds in the United Kingdom have attacked migrants and refugees’ houses in violent outbursts. And in Germany, the idea of the forced return of those with immigrant backgrounds, whether born in Germany or not, has gained popularity. If Donald Trump were to be elected president of the United States once again, we could face massive deportations of migrants.
While the programmatic statements of a Geert Wilders, a Nigel Farage, a Donald Trump, and even a Narendra Modi based on the hatred of otherness should not surprise us, there is a failure in our own democratic cultures at large which stultifies judgment and the capacity to understand the perspective of the other. It was the promise of the Enlightenment to attain an “enlarged mentality,” in Kant’s words, and this is increasingly disappearing. In her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Arendt interpreted an “enlarged mentality” in a fashion fully consistent with Adorno’s critique of identitarian thought. Enlarged thought is not empathy, for it does not mean feeling the standpoint of the other or even accepting and agreeing with it. But it does mean making present to oneself the perspective of others involved, and it means asking whether I could “woo for their consent.” Enlarged thought displays the qualities of judgment necessary to retrieve the plural quality of the shared world. By contrast, authoritarian politics encourages projection and paranoia, thus constructing the standpoint of the other in the light of one’s needs and neuroses.
The capacity for enlarged thought has atrophied in contemporary liberal democracies. Some will characterize the concept of an enlarged mentality as being based on a naïve humanism, and even on an arrogant humanitarianism which believes that enlightened liberal individuals can really understand the miseries of the homeless, the marginalized, the impoverished elderly, the sexually marginal. Others will argue that this concept is imperialistic in that its source is Kantian cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century. Such cosmopolitanism justified not only seeking access to the shores of the others in search of refuge when one’s own life and well-being was in danger. Kant, according to Derrida, displays Enlightenment naiveté in not recognizing that hospitality may also harbor hostility; enlarged thinking may be an instance of hostipitality, of good will and antagonism at once. Still others will argue that only members of affected groups, defined by race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender, can take certain standpoints. Intergroup empathy is met with suspicion. Enclosed in our media bubbles and social networks, our likes and dislikes on Facebook and other platforms monitored by the agents of surveillance capitalism, we have lost the capacity not only to reach toward the other; we are even told not to bother because such attempts represent false politics.
In view of the resurgence of the ugly memories which were thought to have been laid to rest, there is the attempt by officials in public institutions to “manage memory and prejudice.” These do not lead to “working through the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) in Adorno’s sense; rather they hold us imprisoned in half-understood principles of pseudo-democratization. Such bureaucratic mismanagement stultifies public discourse by producing confusions between freedoms of opinion and association which we are entitled to as citizens and residents of democratic societies, and our positions as professors, academics, and researchers on controversial issues.
Surely these observations about democratic culture must be supplemented by a materialist critique. Adorno would be the first to point out that a society in which inequality grows, human work becomes increasingly degraded, and life in general becomes more precarious is not one in which we can lead a good life. Nor is such a situation compatible with sustaining a democratic culture. The dominance of the false universals of our time and the rigidity and bitterness of struggles over identitarian categories are surely a manifestation of economic injustice as well. Having been forced together through the mind-numbing speed of financial capital and money markets, and new technologies, our interdependence as peoples of this world is only generating confusions, conflicts, and resentments. An interdependent humanity has become what Adorno called “a negative universal”—an interdependence which results from the unintended consequences of our actions but not our intentions. To transform the negative universality of our current condition into a true universality of non-identitarian solidarity is Adorno’s legacy for us.
© 2024, Boston Review
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