antisemitism as distorted politics: adorno on the public sphere

Antisemitism as Distorted Politics: Adorno on the

Public Sphere

Brett R. Wheeler

n a parable of modern politics, no two figures could contrast more sharply than the antisemite and the work of art. It may be a comic

surprise to find these two associated with one another in political terms at all. Their proximity, however, offers an apposite differentia- tion of the two sides of the modern political personality. For in the work of Theodor W. Adorno, each figure represents a competing ideal. The work of art and the antisemite are endpoints in the development of the subject's relation to the historical world. Their juxtaposition here will serve to illuminate the character of antisemitism as the profound distortion of public life-of politics and the public sphere, which in its ideal, normative form is enacted by the work of art as a fictional space of ethical exchange between Self and Other.

Because Adorno's thought is as much known for its irreverence to application as for its philosophical insight, translating these abstract terms into illuminating analysis will almost certainly prove tortuous. This article is no attempt to make the path straighter. Rather, it takes seriously Adorno's own mandate, that the "only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contem- plate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption."1 However tendentious the attempt, reading Adorno's theory of antisemitism as a theory of the public sphere nonetheless serves his will to estrange and to displace the familiar in order to redeem flashes of insight sedimented precisely in what is familiar.

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I have a bipartite goal here: to retrace the motivation of Adorno's thinking on antisemitism to a crisis in political life, and to secure the historiographic validity of these philosophical insights by linking them to the specific context of events and to the particularity of the victims. Keeping this goal in sight may require that familiar ground be trod again and that steps already made be retraced. In such astrological terms as those that lured Adorno,back to Los Angeles in the 1950s, the constellation should become discernible connecting Adorno's thinking on antisemitism with three other considerations, two in his work and one not: first, with the utopian politics of his philosophy of the artwork; second, with his general theory or anthropology of modern ethics; and, finally, with the methodological challenges of Holocaust historiography posed here in exemplary form by the work of Saul Friedlander. By construing a semblance of meaning encompassing these points and framed by a concern with public life in the modern world, I hope to unveil a pattern of light that has been stoically shaded by Adorno's saturnine polemic but that might now illuminate that discrepant relation between a historical narrative and the particularity of its victims and perpetrators which has quite properly dogged Holo- caust historiography.

In what follows, the philosophical lines of antisemitism and of the work of art in Adorno's thinking will become more sharply drawn when they are juxtaposed with an implicit theory of public life more familiarly expounded by Adorno's one-time assistant, Jiirgen Habermas.2 We can then turn to the inescapable historiographic challenges that all theories of antisemitism face, because they are inextricably entwined in the explication and exegesis of the Holocaust. Historiographic issues indeed will demand repeated attention: theories of antisemitism and histories of the Holocaust must address, if not overcome, the incommensurability of its representation with the particularity of its victims, events, and perpetrators. As part of a larger critique of modernity, Adorno's theory of antisemitism is as guilty as any of adumbrating an explanatory or hermeneutic reconciliation of the individual events and agents, on the one hand, with the import of the Holocaust, on the other, as a historical or theological fissure writ large. The first two sections of this article reconstruct a critique of modernity that allows Adorno's work to avoid traps set by the related ethical imperatives as well as to exemplify their mandate dialectically.

The last three sections account for the political foundations of Adorno's anthropology of modern ethics, whose contrasting forms are heralded by the figures of the work of art and the antisemite. We will see how Adorno's theory of antisemitism evades a violent collapse of

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the particular and the general in the cruel historiographic challenges in talking about the Holocaust, evinced time and again by historians and philosophers alike. Adorno's theory of political education adjoins the ontogenesis of individual action with the sociological understanding of the collective genocide of European Jewry. Thus, by exposing historiographic implications of Adorno's thought in terms of a political philosophy, this new Adorno, contemplated from the "standpoint of redemption," promises to shed light on the terms of the debate on the historiography of the Holocaust, the role of antisemitism in it, and the historical significance of its victims.

A Perverse Parable: Antisemites and Works of Art

The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno wrote with Max Horkhei- mer, director of the exiled Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, primarily after the two had moved to California, is one of the earliest and probably the best known of Adorno's attempts to explain the rise of antisemitism. The work's essential thesis is well known: reason is

anthropologically conditioned by the fear of nature, and its instrumental drive to emancipate humans from nature dialectically turns back on itself, prostituting reason as a means of domination rather than emancipation. Written in cooperation with Leo Lowenthal, the final chapter of the book (entitled "The Elements of Antisemitism") bears the theoretical and stylistic markings of Adorno's deeply dialectical thinking. According to its explication of antisemitism, it was the Jews who first appropriated the mythic domination of nature as a system of rational legislation-as Law. In place of a mimetic compatibility with nature, theJews transformed taboos against images into rational form: "They did not eliminate adaptation to nature, but converted it into a series of duties in the form of ritual."3

Focused on the exemplary figure of the Jew as the guilty party of alienation, "The Elements of Antisemitism" operates as a sociology of mimetic comportment and of the consequent domination of-or reconciliation with-nature by human subjects, depending on the cognitive route taken. It was also, in some respects, a successor to Horkheimer's work on the anthropology of egoism and Adorno's work on Richard Wagner in the late 1930s. In the latter, the author identifies the sources of antisemitism as a moral-cognitive distortion in ego-development attributable to the bourgeois naturalization of racial distinction. Adorno argues that hatred of the socially marked, idiosyncratic Jew is the product of an introverted disgust with actually being like the

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Jew. As the outsider-the signet of a banished immediacy of subject and object, of nature and human agents-the Jew evokes a neurotic fear of being Other. Devoid of reflective consciousness, the bourgeois resents the reminder of nonidentity and transmutes this resentment into paroxysms of social paranoia. Antisemitism exists, therefore, in the "no man's land between idiosyncrasy and paranoia,"4 Adorno writes, referring there to Wagner. Set between sadism and masochism, the antisemite suffers from the "fear of being thought to be the same as that which is found disgusting."5

The bourgeois Wagner and his compatriots suffered from a retarded development that precluded the possibility of that redemption of mimetic proximity to the object, as Adorno conceived emancipation, and that led instead to a hate of those who are ascribed with denying immediacy to the retarded, and hence childlike subject that longs to perceive in archaic images of nature a magical identity with it:

[Jews] are both clever and stupid, similar and dissimilar. They are declared guilty of something which they, as the first burghers, were the first to overcome: the lure of base instincts, reversion to animality and to the ground, the service of images. Because they invented the concept of kosher meat, they are persecuted as swine.6

According to Adorno's anthropology, the residue of true but suppressed experience reveals itself in sublimated form as resentment. The potentially revolutionary force of self-conscious estrangement from nature and the social world outside the ego is thereby truncated, and it manifests this truncation in aggression toward those whom, as we saw above, were ascribed with the source of this alienation: theJews.

Fascism, finally, sought to harness this aggression, in Adorno and Horkheimer's words, by making "the rebellion of suppressed nature against domination directly useful to domination."7

In sum, the genocide against the Jews will become in Adorno's phenomenology of the Holocaust a kind of revenge for the domination of nature achieved by civilization that itself began with theJews.8 At the same time, it is the fulfillment of the psychological introversion of instrumental reason. In contrast, Adorno's fully emancipated, mature subject is regulated by a conscience that, in his words, "consisted in the devotion of the ego to the substantial outside world, in the ability to take into account the true interests of others. This ability is the capacity for reflection as the penetration of receptivity and imagination."9 This stance is modeled on the ethical posture of the artwork to its constituents and of the observer to the artwork.

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The antisemite is, then, the product of perverted enlightenment. This figure recalls deeply archaic desires by the subject to throw off the cloak of its subjectivity and recover an immediate and magical consan- guinity with nature. Renaturalizing the object of identification serves only to exacerbate heteronomy and therefore to occlude the subjectivity of subjects. The resulting "subjectless subject" Adorno associates with the paranoiac, who as an agent can no longer imagine the object as radically different from itself. As opposed to "conscious projection," which requires reflection on the mediation of reality and a productive tension between the world of perception and the world of object,10 the "false projection" associated with paranoia is the apotheosis of the domination of nature that has been fully internalized:

Antisemitism is based on false projection. It is the counterpart of true mimesis, and fundamentally related to the repressed form; in fact, it is probably the morbid expression of repressed mimesis. Mimesis imitates the environment, but false projection makes the environment like itself. For mimesis the outside world is a model which the inner world must try to conform to: the alien must become familiar; but false projection confuses the inner and outer world and defines the most intimate expe- riences as hostile. Impulses which the subject will not admit as his own even though they are most assuredly so, are attributed to the object-the prospective victim."

Strikingly, antisemitism loses its group-specificity here. It becomes another name for the culture industry, merely identical with reified consciousness: "Antisemitism is a mass medium," Adorno would assert

in the early 1960s.12 Yet, whatever the reductionist dangers, antisemitism serves for now as the most compelling typological counterpart to the ethical imperative Adorno ascribes to modernist aesthetics: the mimesis that consciously projects objects, that "snuggles up" (sich anschmiegeln) to the object without appropriating it to a conceptual regime-and that does not sacrifice the particularity of objects as the victimized stand-in for the lost innocence of nature.13

Modernity has almost completely purged this ethical, mimetic relation from the world. Moreover, antisemitism bears witness specifically to the removal of noninstrumental communication from the realm of

politics, society, and especially culture. Only in artworks and possibly intimate relationships will Adorno discover the kind of rationality conditionally free of domination, where imagination is still operative. For within its frame, the artwork enacts an intimate relation to that which it represents. But it remains a semblance and never becomes what it signifies. The antisemite, by contrast, is the attenuated ego of

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mass culture-an anti-subject of cultural discontent, who consumes a world to which its needs and desires have already been made to conform as a condition of its survival. This antisemite cannot tolerate

the kind of rigorous intimacy with its world as is enacted by the artwork, for such intimacy reminds him-again, as the figural archetype of the one-dimensional man-of a world other than the one safely ensconced in his own ego. There, as a prisoner of the narcissistic subject, alterity (or Otherness) becomes only a paranoid projection of the ego, ironically both resented and rendered impotent to resist its appropriation into the structure of this resentment. The heteronomous consumption of culture does not, however, sate his appetite, because that anthropological need for intimacy remains. And this need, which the antisemite only unconsciously knows he cannot fulfill, manifests itself in the latent or sublimated resentment directed against the Other by exterminating it.

Artworks represent the negative inversion of such exterminationism. "Snuggling up" to alterity, artworks give a semblance of voice to their Other-that is, what they ostensibly represent. They thus provide a model for emancipated politics, for a communicative harmony of subject and object without conflating the two, as Adorno writes at the outset of his unfinished work Aesthetic Theory:

[Artworks] speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply exists. Yet it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content.14

Artworks, then, are those things that resist discursive reason. Here, imagination is at work in holding the constituents of the whole work and the semblance of a meaningful totality in a productive tension. Echoing Max Weber's famous dictum that art has "taken over the function of a this-worldly salvation,"'5 Adorno represents artworks as the residue and the anticipation of true happiness: of emancipated communication. They emancipate because they create a forum for the communication of their constituents without insisting on the conceptual or virtual identity between these constituents and themselves. Indeed, for Adorno in the mid-1930s, it had been the twelve-tone scale that represented the formal fulfillment of Karl Marx's vision of a utopian "association of free men,"16 since the structure ostensibly avoids subsuming any element of the music under a lead tone. He later abjured this specific claim. But throughout his life, he held to the

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conviction that, though never formally reaching beyond itself to the domain of actuality, the work enacts at least a fictional reconciliation of subject and object without conflating the two. The artwork thus exemplifies momentary freedom, mimetically rescuing particularity in the enactment of signification without effacing the concrete phenom- enality of the particulars. For as semblance, the artwork can scarcely be instrumentalized, forced to serve as the model for a better society; nor can it instrumentalize its particular constituents, whose collective meaning is always an illusion.'7 Instead, it is the reminder of a prehis- tory of human associations that were not based on domination as well as of the possibility of a better world.

The ethical and political implications of this now-familiar Adornian vision of art are striking. Adorno's theory of the artwork anticipates, if not the communicative rationality elaborated by the enlightenment- advocate Habermas, then at least the normative potential inherent in the historical public sphere, where communication was driven by the common imagination of a noncoercive collective-an aesthetic community in which imagination had public import. Before moving on to this, however, I want to enumerate some of the difficulties and problematic generalizations implicit in Adorno's thinking that Holocaust historiography itself puts into clearer relief. My hypothesis has already been anticipated: whatever its problems, the complex philosophical construction of antisemitism in Adorno's oeuvre that has eluded much

concrete applicability to a more specific historical understanding might be translated into a latent philosophy of political pathology and totalitarian politics, as contrasted to the noncoerced forum of the artwork. As such, antisemitism would be not an epiphenomenon of a totalitarian age but a specific product of modernity's distorted politics.

Foxes and Hedgehogs: Holocaust Incommensurables

Whether antisemitism is understood in ontological or more modestly sociohistorical terms, it is impossible for it to escape the gravitational pull of the Holocaust. No motivation to understand it or historical narrative to explain it can, or probably should, elude the teleological grasp of this sometimes historical, sometimes theological event. The function of antisemitism in the years, even centuries, that either led to or contributed to the German genocide against European Jewry is perhaps still in dispute. Yet, however controversial the etiology of specific events and institutional causes, nothing remains more necessary yet ethically elusive than the historiographic representation of the

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radically incommensurable divisions among the banality of individual deeds, the local horror of individual and collective suffering, and the totality of the Final Solution as a universal-historical rupture.

Much thinking on the causes of the Holocaust can still be catego- rized-even self-identified-in terms of intentionalism versus func-

tionalism.18 But no intellectual debate on the Holocaust has been so

compelling as the one posing the question of its very comprehensibil- ity. It is here that Adorno's theory of antisemitism can be most helpful, even if we should regard it with initial skepticism. On the one hand, there are few philosophical postures that shift the hermeneutic debate on the origins and understanding of the Holocaust so quickly as does Adorno's to such a vast and macro-logical domain as the fate of modernity itself. When attempting to bridge the gap from the empirical event to its historical meaning, one is rightly suspicious of Adorno's brute identification of antisemitism with the culture industry-when he claims that antisemitism must be seen as "something like the ontology of advertising [ Ontologie der Reklame] ."19 Yet Adorno is no Hannah Arendt. Without wanting to execrate the long and productive debate on the banal character of evil that has continued since Arendt's text on

Eichmann's trial appeared in the New Yorker,20 I do suggest that Adorno's rigor and polemic accomplish much more. On the other hand, therefore, we might discover ultimately that Adorno's project is properly to be understood as a mediation of individual and history, reducing neither to the other, while also challenging the final unrepresentability of the Holocaust.

It is difficult to defy the eloquent paradoxes that Saul Friedlander has associated with the incommensurables of Holocaust historiography. He has pointed consistently to that which ironically only prophets can see in Holocaust narratives: the limits of its interpretability and its "historicization."21 Friedlander argues that, methodologically speaking, the various narratological, cognitive, and empirical points of access to an interpretation of the Holocaust present us with ethical incommensurables.22 There is an inverse relation, he claims, between an ethical understanding of the outcome and a historical understanding of its causes and mechanism. The more we understand one, the more distant and opaque the other becomes. Like Isaiah Berlin's proverbial fox, who pursues the many ends and possible explanations without hope of unity, historians are obliged to explain and to understand yet to be forever rebuffed in their desire to nestle in with the hedgehog and settle on a monolithic interpretation of the whole.23

Still, one tenacious but as yet inexplicable element of the story seems, to unite both ends. According to Friedlinder, "the only global interpre-

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tation that seems to 'apply' is also the most traditional: the decisive effect of an ever more radical antisemitic factor."24 And, in his more recent work, he becomes more bold, adducing a culturalist feature of European antisemitism unique to Germany that, with its expansive etiological claims, violates perhaps even his own proscription against holistic interpretability-a feature he calls "redemptive anti-Semi- tism."25 Friedlinder continues to believe that the history of the Final Solution must ultimately consist in the individual stories of its victims. Yet, with a renewed pathos for the relevance of understanding, he indicates that a theory of antisemitism might serve to mediate the paradoxical historiographic incommensurability and to present a potentially holistic story. Comprehending the historical event as a whole has compelling contemporary import:

Nazi persecutions and exterminations were perpetrated by ordinary people who lived and acted within a modern society not unlike our own, a society that had produced them as well as the methods and instruments for the implementation of their actions; the goals of these actions, however, were formulated by a regime, an ideology, a political culture that were anything but commonplace. It is the relationship between the uncommon and the ordinary, the fusion of the widely shared murderous potentialities of the world that is also ours and the peculiar frenzy of the Nazi apocalyptic drive against the mortal enemy, the Jew, that give both the universal significance and historical distinctiveness to the "Final Solu- tion of the Jewish Question."26

Understanding the universal significance of the Holocaust has become politically imperative for Friedlander. And he seems to conclude that, for the hedgehog to reach for such a thing, the cleverness of the fox is also required so that the hedgehog can engage in the empirical matters of real life and mediate between the uncommon and the ordinary on both the universal and the local levels of the historiographic endeavor. Adorno's contribution consists precisely in providing such mediation for the fox. He seeks to transcend the quotidian level of engagement and experience and to understand the perversity of the individual act as not distinct, but rather coextensive with the perversity of the historical whole that was the Shoah.

There has been little effort to integrate Adorno's thinking on antisemitism into an operationalizable theory that would contribute much to specific studies of historical cases. The fraught logic of "applying" dialectical thinking (much less thinking that adduces the mere negative residue of dialectics as validation) speaks against the attempt.27 At the same time, dialectical thought has been accused of imposing

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regimes of intelligibility onto the victims that once again violently silence those very voices whose particular language is not translatable into either speculative polemics or historiography:

Nevertheless, in declaring that one must speak about "Auschwitz" but that one can only speak about it truly if the anonymous referent of the phrase becomes its addressees and addressor and thereupon "names" itself, the summons to express the result of "Auschwitz" is an intimidation (or notification) that prejudges the nature of the object. If the name hidden by "Auschwitz" is the death of the magical, "beautiful death," how could the latter, which sustains the speculative movement, rise back up from its death in the camps? And, on the other hand, supposing that "after Auschwitz" speculative discourse had died, does it follow that it leaves place only to subjective chatter and the wickedness of modesty? It is within speculative logic that this alternative is formulated. To accept it would be to perpetuate that logic.28

Implicit in this critique of Adorno by the one-time Marxist Jean- Francois Lyotard is a desire for the ethical redemption of phenomenological particularity. But it comes at a high price. Lyotard insists on an incommensurability of a different kind than Friedlander or Adorno. For Lyotard, discerning the victim and its historical grounds requires not hermeneutic rigor but an acknowledgment of the phenomenological impossibility of the task. Historians, philosophers, perpetrators, victims-all speak within and through heterogeneous "phrase regimens" that cannot be subjected to a meta-idiom into which they might be translated: "For each of these regimens, there corresponds a mode of presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another."29 The philosophical and ethical outcome of this would be quite dire. Referents of one discourse are intelligible only in their syntagmatic locus within that discourse. The conditions of their determinacy are "networks of names and relations between names,"30-that is, they are ultimately indeterminate.

At first, this does seem to guarantee particularity, to preserve incommensurables without subsumption or coerced modes of speech. The indeterminacy of the victim-here labeled "the Jews" who were murdered or interned-resists it becoming sublated with its historical concept, by which it would lose its specificity to the empire of the hedgehog. One can happily concede the truth of this phrase: "'Jews' (as a clear content determined by a concept of 'Jew') were not victims." For only victims, after all, are victims, and a predicate of "Jew" is not "victim." Yet, without being insolent to those who suffered and died, one can safely say that many of these victims were Jews, variously

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defined, and indeed were victims because of this. I am venturing to assert that the intelligibility of such a phrase is not limited to historians as historians, or to philosophers as philosophers, or to me as myself. It has similar communicative force-if only tentatively-to all of us. It posits a point of departure-a speculative but fragile sign-for a discus- sion of the Holocaust on all levels. Indeed, to deny this would actually perpetuate what, it seems, Lyotard wants to avoid: effacing the specificity of the victims. For victimhood becomes defined here, if not by a concept, then at least by the practical inability to express determinate meaning, in which the subject, or its analogue, is "divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim."3' This practice of divestiture-what Lyotard calls the "differend"-leads to indeterminacy in communication altogether. 'Victim" becomes here a mere structure of noncommunicability: victim-Jew-as differend in the enactment of silence or the speechlessness of language games.

Dialectical determinacy will, I think, do more for the preservation of particularity than its radical indeterminacy can. Negative dialectics provided not answers but certainly a mode of philosophical expression that gave voice to the dead. It provided a form of mediation fulfilled by the ethical principle of mimesis discussed earlier. I hope, therefore, that the redemptive critique of Adorno's thinking on antisemitism begins to fortify the validity of any light his theory of antisemitism might shed on historiographic struggles with the representability of the German genocide of European Jews. If so, it would help to explicate the link between mimesis and antisemitism in a way that relies on Adorno's work to clarify the historiographic specificity of the Jews in the Holocaust.32

If precisely viewed more dialectically, as an integrated theory of the destruction of political conditions for common life altogether, then the theory of antisemitism proffered here in Adorno's name connects the individual, even somatic event of sadism and suffering with its motiva- tional and psychological conditions emerging from the destruction of public life. We can evade the quandary of applicability by undertaking instead a phenomenology of antisemitism that discloses connections between psychological conditions ofmass-acculturated individuals with the mass-cultural destruction of a reconciled political community. If successful, such a view of antisemitism as political pathology will enjoy both the specificity of the fox and the principled totality of the hedgehog, and it will remain honest both to philosophy and to history.

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Mimesis and the Two Paths of Bildung

Keeping the historiographic demands in view, we also need to recall the meaning of antisemitism and its socioethical and psychological dimen- sions. Moreover, the connection between the specific and the general-between the individual-psychological and the sociohistorical- needs to be more firmly established. This connection constitutes the crux of my reconstructive "redemptive critique," which will ultimately allow Adorno's theory of political education to reveal the mechanism by which individual actors and the conditions of their sociohistorical existence are reciprocally construed and bound together. There are several steps to take: first, to explicate the anthropological origins of the antisemite and explain why the Jew, as a product of the destruction of a common, public, or political world, becomes his victim; second, to relate this destruction to the loss of authority in modernity, which provided the politically arid grounds for the sociohistorical regime in which the "Jew," as we have seen, became an emblem for this destruction; and, finally, to clarify how this philosophy of the public world- and of its desolation-provides an implicit response to the historiographic challenge posed by Friedlander on the representability of the Holocaust. This final step, moreover, also augurs a redemption or reconciliation of the whole and the part-the subject and the object- and hence an end to antisemitism both as collectivist extermination

and as psychological violence. To suggest a link between antisemitism and the perversion of the

political relation between subjects and objects, we need to return to the theory of antisemitism itself and to recall that antisemitism was primarily-or so Adorno contends-the manifestation of a loss of reflection, the loss of imagination, and the internalization of the faculties of domination that had once been directed toward nature.

It was, in Susan Buck-Morss' apt phrase, a dialectic of sadism and masochism.33

At this point in the story, Jews are representing not themselves but still a certain "type" of victim. As such, their particular removal as a threatening Other in the German body politic would not secure the desired emancipation of that body from the straitjacket of incomplete subjectivity. 'Jew" was merely the nominal symptom of social distortion. And, phenomenologically, the intelligibility of the Jew and that of the enemy-the metaphysical thorn in the side of the narcissistic subject- are not clearly distinguishable; neither the recognition nor the right of the Jew to be the real historical victim has been established. In Adorno's work so far, the Jew is instead seen only as the fragile imped-

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iment in a drive toward the annihilation of subjectivity altogether- toward conformity. Although we will see howJews become real historical victims-the historiographic object of the fox's care-for now they are still solidly in the domain of the hedgehog, representing simply those who needed to be eliminated in a world of mass culture because

the new kind of domination practiced by mass culture does not allow for difference. Difference was replaced by the pathetic imitation of unity. The ritual performance, the discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus of the fascist spectacle fulfilled the false mimesis, a mimesis that was itself merely mimicking the original domination of nature, which had required subjectivity, by now eliminating subjectivity. "Fascism," as noted earlier, is "totalitarian in that it seeks to make the

rebellion of suppressed nature against domination directly useful to domination."34

This false mimesis represented, then, both a specific hate ofJews and a world-historical development in political ethics. Divining the empirical and philosophical connection between the psychology of mortal resentment and the sociology of totalitarian ethics was Adorno's goal from the 1930s onward, first as the intellectual partner of Max Horkheimer and, after their return to Germany and especially in the 1960s, increasingly as the leading figure of the Institute for Social Research. But these two elements-psychology and sociology-remain isolated methodological paths of foxes and hedgehogs if no connection is evinced between the individual and the social levels of analysis. This problem doubtlessly plagued the validity of the research project of the institute in its attempt to mediate between empirical data and speculative philosophy. Yet, however cloudy the methodological questions at the time, it is possible to discern-through a kind of carto- graphic hindsight-a clear intersection of the psychological and the socioethical paths. On the map I am presenting here, this intersection is called politics.

Adorno's task was to discern and define the "objective" feature of modern society that manifested itself in the dystopian dialectic of mass culture and the totalitarian personality.35 He accepted as a truism the total administration of the social and psychological world by forces anthropologically embedded in the instrumentality of human reason. The Holocaust, though, had not been the original point of departure for the institute's work before the 1940s. The goal, rather, was hope. Rationalized death camps only served to confirm apocalyptically the need for an alternative world. And, despite the rampant evidence of thoroughly abjected subjectivity and decimated political life, optimism never completely failed. In the face of a devastated twentieth century,

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these thinkers searched on for even the tiniest cracks in the grim cybernetic edifice of modern life.

However, every path to another world had to pass through the Holocaust. If this event and the conditions of its possibility represented the apotheosis of modern social pathology, then only an understanding of these conditions would lead to the possibility of their critique and transformation. Adorno was convinced that the most fundamental

historical and anthropological condition for the Holocaust was the destruction of substantive communal relations-even in their other-

wise oppressive forms. Subjectivity was a social, not an idiosyncratic product. Free individuality grew out of a properly mimetic proximity to, and encounter with, other agents, with one's action conditioned by conscious approximations of others' actions-reflective "imitations" and a desire to join in society, without, however, becoming identical to it. The qualities that Adorno identifies in the ideals of Bildung (the classical bourgeois concept of social education and self-cultivation) rely on a mimetic disposition of the subject toward other subjects. Subjective particularity and social integration (politics) are dialectically interdependent.

At their logical origins, subjects are the product of a symbolically mediated distinction between themselves and everything else. Through the dialectical terms of Hegel's parlance, the "diremption" of subject and object transforms this painfully obvious observation into a foundational paradox of dialectical thinking. From Kant's Critique of Judgment to Hegel's early writings on theology to the theories of communicative action expounded by Habermas,36 the challenge of this paradox-understanding subjects and objects as politically coextensive-has been constitutive of modernity.37 As an "incomplete project," modernity's greatest adversity, according to this tale, is the attenuated part played by the autonomous individual in the constitution of political autonomy. The individual subject has increasingly fallen prey to the demands of a kind of politics that has nothing to do with the mutual communication of difference-with true mimesis. Socialization qua education is incomplete. The culture industry replaces the fragile process of communicating one's particularity to others with prefabri- cated models of identification-that is, the violent conflation of subjective agency with collective imperatives driven by productive forces and thus with functionally short-circuited autonomy.

Fascism's political genius was that it learned to feed off of this attenuation. Indeed, fascism was the colonization of so-called Bildung by the mechanisms of social integration that bypassed the individual altogether. Bourgeois Bildung had once represented the creation of

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citizens in the distant image of God through the cultivation of reflective reason innate to the individual. Providing the political conditions for this to occur was the goal of the later Enlightenment in the battle against heteronomous forces, be they political, psychological, or social. By cultivating the autonomous individual, the social and political order was also to become a freer forum for individuals to express their particularity in reasoned ways, thereby fulfilling the promise of the Enlightenment and the republican reconciliation of subject and social world.38 Whether this conception had ever been anything more than a regulative norm is doubtful. And Adorno is quite convinced that the very naivete of such an understanding is doomed "teleologically to decline."39 There was no time in which the identification (i.e., mimesis)

was anything more than an ideological veil over the heteronomous forces of a social drive for conformity. Bildung was attenuated from the outset as an illusive reconciliation of subject and object, of world and agency, functioning ultimately as a retroactive apology for the conformism capitalism required.

Nonetheless, autonomy retained enormous actuality for Adorno. Indeed, as suggested already, he relied on a foundational anthropological drive toward autonomy as the primary determinant of human agency, even while autonomy functioned to undermine itself. However inhibited autonomy might be by the apologetic structures of mass society, the need for it would inevitably guarantee moments of reflection on conditions of domination and preserve the possibility of emancipation from the false identification orchestrated by the culture industry. Consequently, Adorno discerned manifestations of this drive in precisely the most degenerate forms of abjected subjectivity, where rebellion might actually be the only path left. It was in these fissures in the total administration of human development by anonymous social forces that he could catch a glimpse of hope. He felt that modern humans do ultimately feel the noose ofheteronomy around their necks despite being sedated by the spectacles of mass culture. In a radio address three years before his death, Adorno would still maintain that "one can indeed speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered world-a feeling of imprisonment in a thoroughly socialized context like a tightly spun web";40 a few breaths later, he deigned a suggestion of anthropological resistance in human autonomy that is "the only true force against the principle of Auschwitz."41 Adorno remained enough of a Hegelian-Marxist to believe that the possibility of a sudden awakening from the torpor of empty identification with the collective must always be anticipated as the dialectical culmination of a historical process of abjection.

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Reconciliation was a distant vision but not an impossibility. Nonethe- less, the origins of culture contained anthropological challenges that would be hard to overcome. For Adorno it was, after all, an ontogenetic truth that the education qua cultivation of the individual was conditioned on the suppression of animalist instincts. Indeed, the need to sublimate natural energies as a form of social assimilation was, follow- ing Freud, the basic source of "discontent" in culture. But it was also its necessary precondition. The process of controlling or sublimating these energies produced two conflicting outcomes: either greater individual autonomy from the base forces of nature, or the antisemitic heteronomy that actually emerged.

Hence, one outcome represented reconciliation-the productive mimetic proximity but nonidentity to the object. This was solely the province of the work of art, enacting the redemptive process of self-cultivation. Like the socially constructed character of the subject, the artwork

is constituted in such a fashion that as artifacts, as something humanly made, they have their place a priori in the "native realm of spirit" but are, in order to become self-identical, in need of what is nonidentical, heterogeneous, and not already formed. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent, compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant.42

In an age of subjectless subjectivity, the "logicality of artworks" pre- serves autonomous rationality, Adorno concludes.43 Artworks are thereby construed as the sociological residue of both politics and subjectivity. This subjectivity can be actualized only by reactivating the processes of political education not dominated by the ideological imperatives of false identification and conformity. As a normative credo, proper Bildung, Adorno writes, "should be that which belongs to the spirit of the individual who, with its drives sublimated, is grounded in its own consciousness but socially integrated."44 In ethical- political terms, this form of sublimation, modeled on the immanent workings of the artwork, was manifested for Adorno in bourgeois, heterosexual love and possibly also in friendship. A new political solidarity modeled most convincingly on individual friendship would finally reconcile subjects with one another precisely through an empa- thetic identification that expresses fondness-libidinally defined as what Freud called "aim inhibited love"-in an embrace of, and longing for, the preservation of their differences.45 Accomplishing this ethical

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procedure on a grand political scale would be the definitive and paramount achievement of true enlightenment.

The other path was much shorter and more dangerous. In contrast to the idealized bourgeois Bildung of individuals mimetically "snuggling up" to the world lost to its immediate subjectivity, Adorno envis- aged a psychological type whose education was attenuated, one who had learned to sublimate and to control but who was bereft of the

cognitive ability to live in a world of objects that are mediated. This person was the authoritarian or the antisemite. It was the product of what Adorno called Halbbildung: occluded education. Confronted with a dirempted world, with a world not identical with their own nascent subjectivity, the products of Halbbildung are the terrified children of modernity, alone in a world that is indecipherable in their own terms and without the capacity, figuratively speaking, to learn new languages that would allow them to communicate with this world in order grad- ually to reconcile with alterity. To alleviate their fear, these children are instead comforted by seeing their world in terms not foreign to themselves. They recognize that a world exists at least virtually beyond themselves: they have gone "half' way. But such Halbbildung is paradoxically anathema to the process of proper Bildung and emancipation. For these children also become convinced that this world is

ultimately coextensive with themselves-that it can, as a magical worldview, reveal itself immediately: "To the half-educated the mediated world magically transforms itself into immediacy at an overwhelm- ing distance."46

Instead of viewing themselves as discrete agents who can access the world solely through the treacherous hermeneutics of communication with others, the half-educated petit bourgeois evade the demands of republican virtue and fulfill their need for reconciliation with the world by forming a false identification with the world, as if there were no difference at all. The relation to art evinced by the half-educated masses exemplified for Adorno the crude elimination of difference between Self and Other. In a typical moment of uninhibited vitriol, Adorno insists that the personalization of works of art-the belief that the artwork's task is to give immediate voice to the ego's inner emo- tion-represents an "explosion of barbarism."47 Certainly, it is ethically tenable to see artworks as the manifestations of otherwise voiceless

content; believing, however, that this content thereby speaks to us or out of us through artworks becomes barbaric when the mediated world is magically transformed into something immediate, and hence into something unproblematically and transparently accessi- ble. Halbbildung produces cognitive neonates.

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The unmediated identification of the world with the ego has omi- nous political implications, while also emerging from a perversion of politics. Adorno emphasizes the perfidious effects of liberalism in particular as a political substratum of capitalist atomization and self-satisfied agent of occluded socialization. Nowhere does the critique of liberalism as the individualizing attenuation of true politics come to the fore as clearly, and with as great a melancholy, as in Adorno's postwar requiem to the modern world, Minima Moralia. Pervading the work is the sad but critical response to a world riven by the liberalist division of public and private life, a division that serves not to preserve intimacy or an ethical political community but rather replaces both with a simulacrum of their respective spheres of autonomy. Here, as so often elsewhere, Adorno builds his polemics on the sociological grounds of Max Weber's analysis of authority:

Whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly. For while bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved, their economic pre-condition has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interest is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better. In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a "lot," but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum.48

Isolating subjects in their defensive postures behind the white picket fences of anachronistic privacy, liberalism is the political manifestation of a capitalism that wants only the formal residue of difference between political subjects rather than much messier substantive differences that disrupt rationalized steering mechanisms driven by the market. Since freedom is always defined in terms of collective interaction, liberalism provides the suggestion of freedom in the form of isolation without providing the true conditions of autonomy-something that would require political exchange about the good life and the expression of substantive identification.

When the system is operating efficiently, as in its North American variety, libidinal drives are adequately desublimated by the culture industry, siphoned off from the subject on roller coasters and the immediate gratification of credit card purchases, before the profound frustration of autonomous interactions in public life is even noticed. Halbbildung makes manifest, therefore, not merely the incomplete

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process of education but also the functional need for this incomplete- ness on the part of the system. The sameness of consumers is guaranteed by attenuating the processes of political communication that would be necessary for a complete education through the ethical challenges of self-expression when one is brought face to face with alterity. Ironically, however, this is the happier face-or at least the nonexterminationist version-of the liberal regime. From here the degeneration of politics needs only two more steps, according to Adorno, before the train departs for the East.

Anglo-American liberalism has already taken the first step. For it has isolated humans from the forums of political cultivation that produce political autonomy. Such uncompleted subjects falsely project a private "secret kingdom into the kingdom of all," Adorno claims.49 Politically, this projection is manifested as a "collective narcissism" that compen- sates for modern humans' guilt at being unable to act in accordance with their self-conception, instead making "themselves-in their imag- inations or in reality-a part of something higher and more encompassing, to which they ascribe all the attributes of that which they lack, and from which they get back a virtual share in these qualities."50 Here we discover the nascent origins for identification with the Fuhrer. More pertinent for the moment, Adorno's explication of collective narcissism exposes the menace inherent in isolating individuals from real communication with others. Freed of actual interaction with a collec-

tive of which the subject is a discrete member, the half-educated Richard Wagner, we recall, is caught between idiosyncrasy and paranoia, reveling in the self-satisfied identification with a compensatory projection-be it a real community of racial purity or simply pure imagination. Adorno's words here augur, therefore, both steps: the danger of apolitically imagined communities, and the isolation of the individual in a simulacrum of political interaction. Of course, no figure was more archetypical of false mimetic comportment than was the antisemite.

Thus, the antisemite evinces his animus both as actual bigot and as sociopsychological type. He is the blind agent of genocide. To cure this blindness, the members of the institute hoped to discover the tangent of the macro-historical conditions of totalitarianism and the specific acts of violence perpetrated by the psychic personalities it produces. If one contends that torture is, in a paraphrase by Adorno of Horkheimer's words, "the directed and facilitated conformity of the human being to the collective,"51 then two questions require immediate answers. First, what concrete consequences are there to this conformity-to the false mimetic impulse of the half-educated petite

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bourgeois? And, second, how did this kind of conformist socialization lead to torture and to extermination?

In answering these questions, no implement was to prove as indispensable as the psychoanalytic explication of ego development as a process of socialization. As we saw, Adorno followed Freud in tracing the emergence of subjectivity from the continuum of the natural world as a process of sublimation. This is the origin of the Oedipal structure-the imposition of regimes of intelligibility on the world-in what Judith Butler has propitiously labeled "subjection."52 In a saturnine inversion of romantic reflection-philosophy, psychoanalysis envisages the subject as the thwarted confrontation of the id with its environ-

ment. In productive or anaclitic sublimation conceived as healthy object choice, the ego can transform its wounds through reflection on the conditions of their possibility-that is, on the sociohistorical conditions of cognition-into an ethical posture toward the world in the form of "love" curiously modeled for Adorno on the heterosexual family.53 This is also captured by the redemptive version of mimesis in which the subject "snuggles up" intimately to its object as an artwork does to the semblance of its referent. As the alternative to this, as the master of false mimesis, the fascist is beset by a narcissistic and masoch- istic mode of cathexis, desiring to consume or to "devour" the object as a mere extension of himself.

This structure diverges, however, from Freud's tale of sublimation, which familiarly ends in an Oedipal struggle to overthrow whatever prevents the fulfillment of pleasure-typically the father-and thereby to emancipate oneself. The subject that Adorno derives from this phenomenology of the fascist personality is post-Oedipal. The antisemitic subject is not the product of frustrated drives but rather of the regime of consumption itself. Modern subjects, exiled from the public world, of which the artwork is only a reminder, are mere simulacra. They mimic the structure of consumption of which they are now the tools. Indeed, Adorno indicates that the culture industry has intervened even before sublimation has occurred. There is no ego that emerges as the mediating agent between the drives and the world. Instead, the libido is provided surrogate forms of sublimation in the mass enjoyment of spectacles, supplied not by rulers to alleviate the threats to their authority but rather by the system of productive forces, which thereby achieves functionally complete conformity not only in behavior but also in the very structure of personalities. Therein lies the difference between traditional and totalitarian authority. The ego is merely the id allowed to linger with itself and to pursue an uninhibited mother-cathexis-or at

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least to enjoy an ersatz for the mother in the form of culture as eternal spectacle.

The antisemitic ego, therefore, is a desublimated ego, one never allowed to confront the objective Other as anything but an extension of itself. Instead of the anthropological struggle with the paradoxes of subject-object diremption that might lead to ethical relations, the antisemitic subject is never a subject at all. Adhering to a process Adorno famously called "psychoanalysis in reverse," this vision of the fascist antisemite sees the culture industry not as freeing the individual from the heteronomy of their own unconscious, but as pursuing "the expropriation of the unconscious by social control instead of making the subjects conscious of their unconscious."54 This half-subject over- comes diremption by having its needs fulfilled through desublimation, or what Adorno calls "idealization." Slavoj Zizek has similarly recon- structed the "pervert" as the post-Oedipal subject, freed from the tensions of denial and constructive sublimation, of which the "hysteric" is the quasi-ethical manifestation.55 This process becomes political when subjects begin to elude the symbolic domain altogether and lose their determinacy in relation to others. In historical terms, the Jew, with its rationalized form of mimesis, was the sociological sign of subjective determinacy, whose removal-so the antisemite believes- will pave the road to the (delusional) return to nature and the complete evasion of the painful habitus of symbolic, intersubjective mediation.

This psychoanalytic model aptly describes the follower of the Fuhrer, whom Adorno posits as the model for the subject of idealization that never really is one. In an essay first published in English in 1951, Adorno imagines this follower as a new type of authoritarian personality, though it might more precisely be designated as totalitarian: "The leader image gratifies the follower's twofold wish to submit to authority and to be the authority himself. This fits into a world in which irratio- nal control is exercised though it has lost its inner conviction through universal enlightenment."56 The ego here does not suffer from narcissism; the ego is the replication of narcissistic structures. Andrew Hewitt has pointed out the clear connection Adorno draws between this attenuated personality and the homosexual as a type and an actuality.57 The (male) homosexual is ostensibly most prone to idealization, because his personality mimics the oblivion to alterity. Instead of overthrowing his Oedipal oppressors, he idealizes it and transforms it into both the subject of authority-since he is collectively identical with it-and the adherent of that authority. As a group, Hewitt's "homofascists," in Freud's words cited by Adorno, "substitute one and

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the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified with one another in their ego."58

Gratuitous homophobia infects the diagnosis. But nominally it is a convincing depiction of the process denoting the emergence of the fascist, or the antisemite, or the homosexual personality-the rogues' gallery of subjectless subjects-from disrupted ego-development. Yet, however deep the psychological predisposition of these authoritarian personalities to torture and extermination (and however great the structural prejudices in the theory of it), most of the Frankfurt School ultimately rejected psychoanalytic explanations of the real historical event itself-the actual extermination of a race at Auschwitz-Birkenau,

Treblinka, Chelmno, and elsewhere. It partially explains the resistance exhibited by Adorno to Alexander Mitscherlich joining the institute in 1953 that Adorno refused to identify the cause of National Socialism in

a certain psychological type.59 Fascism merely exploited the emptied types that existed already: the authority-bound characters. The most that could be maintained, it seems, was a kind of elective affinity between the fascist social structure and the psychological type that was produced by mass culture.

What, then, are the proper etiological conclusions about the Holo- caust that we should draw from the explication so far? There is, to be sure, a proliferation of typological designations for the perpetrators- for the antisemitic or authoritarian personality. Was it even the Jews who were the intended victims, or were they, as Horkheimer later wrote, "interchangeable" or arbitrary placeholders for the historical cum ontological type of victim? These questions have been repeatedly posed from historical, psychological, and sociological perspectives of analysis. It remains for us finally to discern the point of mediation between the psychological and sociological modes of analysis brought to bear on the Holocaust and on antisemitism in Adorno's work, and

thereby to reclaim the dialectical productivity of his thinking that allows the historical potential for victimization to converge with the actual victim of this crime.

Virtual Victims? Jews and Modernity

The danger lingers on that the antisemite represents merely a proto- type of modern political desublimation and that the 'Jew" is merely the abstract victim of rationalization and disenchantment. Certainly, Horkheimer and Adorno did agree that Jews were also the functional product of the fascist or mass-cultural drive to eliminate subjectivity.60

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But they were not random historical victims, however theoretically interchangeable.

Bereft of the ability to reflect on the mediation of reality, "subjectless subjects" were the agents of a drive for a false community that has taken on a life of its own. Jews were those "outsiders," those without a home, who stand in for the lost immediacy with nature, an immediacy that was coterminous with the emergence of subjectivity in the dialectic of diremption. Jews were the allegory for this diremption in late-nineteenth-century Europe.

The culture industry was effectively refunctionalizing the 'Jew." The encounter with this allegorical Other, itself formed from the logic of rationalization, was disruptive to the cultural conformism enforced by the structural imperatives of capitalism. Impervious to subjective agency, this double antithesis could only be resolved violently. Culture, in terms borrowed from Georg Simmel,61 had become a social technology emptied of intersubjectivity or alterity:

As the development of technology makes physical work more and more superfluous, the latter is more energetically elevated into a model of intellectual work .... This is the secret of the stultification on which

antisemitism thrives. If, even within the framework of logic, the concept encounters the particular only on an external plane, everything which stands for difference in society is threatened.... Individuals are branded asJews and sent to the gas chamber.62

The meaning of Jewishness for Adorno threatened to becomes a tautology-the Jew is defined as the outsider because the outside is defined as theJew.63 Hence,Jews comprise by definition those individuals who, by virtue of their outsider status, still insist on individual rights, abstract justice, and the dignity of the person celebrated by the Enlightenment.64 Paradoxically, it is precisely the universality of these categories that facilitates their degeneration-which leads us finally to the historical relation of antisemitism to public life.Jews were sociolog- ically defined in great part by the disparity between socioeconomic integration and political disenfranchisement.65 Ultimately, even the formal-legal right of equal access to political power functions perfidi- ously only as a technologically supported ideology of equality, identity, and sameness that relies not on the communication about difference

but rather on its domestication and removal from public sight. In Horkheimer and Adorno's account, the liberal politics championed by the Jews in their drive for emancipation served to purge difference from public life and to strip the Jews of substantive alterity, leaving

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them culturally naked. As a socially unmarked group, theJews were the residual reminders of the lie told by the national body to itself about its own racial identity. Moreover, the banishment of religious distinction from the public world led not only to social anomie but also to a dystopian foreclosure of nonidentical subjectivity in politics. An entire limb of the public world-a form and resource for social cognition- had been caught in the machinery of enlightened liberalism.

Jews were, in short, the concrete sociological kingpins in the visible decline of traditional authority. They were, as such, a precondition of fascism, which exploited the psychic fury of the antisemitic type against the reminder of its impotence. Fascism, Adorno wrote, "related with the decline and destruction of old, established authority in the Second Empire, and people were not prepared for self-determination."66 Finally, then, the paths of the fox and the hedgehog converge. The particular history of the Jews linked their sociological status with the decline in authority for which they were the specific manifestation. Historically, indeed, the assimilation of the Jews in the nineteenth century was a turning point in the solidification of the "dialectical link between enlightenment and domination."67 Visible within the sphere of circulation, liberal Jews found increasing social acceptance or at least integration without the accompanying access to political power or participation in political institutions. Particularly in his essay on Heinrich Heine,68 Adorno sees the assimilation of the Jews as the abandonment of social particularity and hence the perpetuation of the dialectic of enlightenment. Peter Hohendahl has pointed out that, in Adorno's work from the 1940s onward, the assimilationism of the

Jews-the rejection of their own Heimatlosigkeit, or what Arendt called their pariah status-connected their fate ineluctably with the fate of mankind in the modern world.69

The Jews had abandoned their particularity, their substantive- again, also religious-identity in order to participate in a society of nonspecific, universal persons. Hence, for Adorno-and this is the most controversial moment of all in his work-the Jews were establish- ing the conditions for their own demise. More than any others, it was they who advocated the privatization of faith and, moreover, the rationalization of the mimetic faculty. The Jewish prohibition on mimesis had not eliminated but rather sublimated the mimetic faculty. Both Jews specifically and their sociological function generally represented the expropriation of mimesis from collective life. The genocide against theJews puts an end to the mimetic faculty in an enraged revolt against its prohibition. Reason had lost the subjectivity requisite to the ethical application of imagination as a form of mimesis.

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Thus, antisemitism represented for Adorno much more and much less than the hate of Jews: less because the concrete individuals with

their concrete fates seemed to be emblems in a more dangerous philosophical game, and more because it concretizes the dialectic of enlightenment of which it is a product. Here, therefore, the problem with Adorno's concept of antisemitism is not so much that it is too abstract to be operationalized; rather, it would seem that antisemitism as a phenomenon is already the conceptual operationalization of the dialectic of enlightenment as a whole. In a phenomenological explication of the genocide against the Jews, antisemitism manifests the distorted publicity that crippled subjectivity and inspired the extermination of all reminders of true emancipation now lost to the subjectless subjects of the culture industry. Adorno's theory of antisemitism thus recounts a decline of a public sphere modeled normatively on the work of art. Viewed in this way, it can be operationalized as a theory of the sociological preconditions for the rise of an exterminationist ideology as a new form of culture. Perhaps with this notion in mind, Horkhei- mer, in his 1947 addition to "The Elements of Antisemitism," could afford a note of optimism:

The fact that antisemitism tends to occur only as part of an interchangeable program is sure hope that it will die out one day. Jews are being murdered at a time when the Fascist leaders could just as easily replace the antisemitism plank in their platform by some other.70

Public Life and Authority

By situating antisemitism at the front end of a phenomenology of modernity, Adorno locates the determinants of antisemitism in an unexpected nexus of an attenuated subjectivity and the depleted public life that caused the attenuation. With the assimilation of difference,

the subjugation of nature to a subjectless conformity, and, moreover, the relegation of sensuousness, theological concerns, and substantive identity to the realm of the private, particularizedjudgments about the world are no longer part of an intersubjective domain that has political relevance. This, according to Adorno, is the root of paranoia and social pathology: the isolation of reflective reason from the realm of the political and the public-the privatization of anaclitic or a true mimetic relationship to sensuous particularity. Paranoia is an asocial neurosis that "tries to achieve with private means something which developed in society through collective labor."71

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The dialectic of enlightenment might be rewritten, then, as a theory of noncontemporaneity rather than as a quasi-metaphysical anthropology of human reason. As we heard Adorno asserting earlier, fascism is the product of a loss of traditional authority without the political-psychological maturity in place for the emergence of real political autonomy.72 Historically, of course, this sounds like an argument for pursuing a historiography of Germany's "special path." And perhaps that is one implication. What is offered here, however, goes far beyond the structural, institutional analysis on which the debate on Germany's abnor- mality turns. Not only does it extend a grim psychological typology of the post-traditional personality but, more important, it evinces a sophisticated, sociohistorical analysis of the role of public life in the processes of ego-development and the education of sovereign subjects, anticipating and perhaps surpassing the celebrated work of the next generation of Western Marxists,Jiirgen Habermas's Structural Transfor- mation of the Public Sphere, which first appeared in 1962.

By explicating the psychosocial connection of authority to public life-with the dialectical relation of collective will-formation and indi-

vidual autonomy-Adorno makes great strides in understanding the intersubjective character of traditional authority structures. We learn that, however oppressive such structures may have been, modernity offers only a false emancipation. Mass culture merely isolated individuals as consumers of belief systems. It thereby impaired the integrative function of these systems as hermeneutic horizons of communication and rendered them instead the property of increasingly idiosyncratic and paranoid subjects. Even religion, as a classic form of domination, had played the important role in society of preserving a substantive collective, however archaic this form of community: "The systems of faith retain something of that collective which protects individuals against illness. Illness is socialized.... Perhaps this was one of the great contributions of religion to the preservation of the species. . . . Their members are afraid of believing in their delusions on their own."73

Surprisingly, then, a reconciled world would have to reactivate something that was lost in the decline of traditional authority and especially in religion. Traditional authority, Adorno claims, had guaranteed key elements of psychopolitical autonomy even while suppressing its institutional actualization. Traditional authority was built on Oedipal struggle, determined by the sublimation of libidinal fulfillment as part of a contest with the father. The totalitarian figure of the antisemite, by contrast, blindly idealizes the Fuhrer figure as himself. Provided with libidinal fulfillment in the spectacle of complete identification with the masses, the totalitarian personality realizes uninhibited desire by nar-

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cissistically appropriating the mother. By providing such fulfillment, mass culture takes possession of the very psychic structures of ontogenetic development and of socialization that, in the traditional narrative of sublimated libido, would have led to a consciousness of one's subjective origins from the structures of this sublimation. By appropriating the unconscious for itself, totalitarian mass society obviates the possibility of critique altogether. It accomplishes this, first, by desublimating libidinal drives through repetition of cultural catharsis. Second, it goes about dismantling the spheres of public life, in which interaction with other agents permits emerging subjects to communicate their particularized needs to others and become socialized in the intersubjective medium of language.

Even in the typical Oedipal structure of traditional authority, the very resistance to complete catharsis provided by hierarchy guaranteed that functional differences in society, culture, and the family would highlight the intersubjective dependency of at least marginally autonomous subjects. The concomitant secularization and leveling of social hierarchies did not, therefore, bring emancipation but rather a new and more sedimented, invidious form of its opposite:

As a matter of fact, the neutralization of religion seems to have led to just the opposite of what the enlightened Freud anticipated: the division between the believers and the nonbelievers has been maintained and

reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and has become more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the doctrine of love vanished.74

That secularization contributed to less, not to greater, autonomy was the consequence of a surprising social function attributable to religion. Religious authority represented not mere domination; like the traditional authority embedded in historical values and hierarchically struc- tured power relations, it was, rather, the product of communal negotiation of needs in response to the threats of nature. Religious dogma was the positive manifestation of a shared quality of human existence: its collective cognitive character.

This is perhaps less of a surprise than it should be. We have seen that Adorno's concept of individual ego development is profoundly and dialectically social. Individual development in isolation leads to pathology at very least and, in its most pernicious manifestation, to an exterminationist antisemitic personality. Individual religious contents serve, therefore, the purposes of traditional authority and domination.

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However, in sociological terms, religion also contains a universal feature of all societies as the communicative precondition for knowledge of the world. Religion, like many institutions in Adorno's thought, thus occupies a paradoxical space as both form of domination and locus of truth. The truth of religion is the sensuous, particularized communal- ity of the group, however coerced. But the Enlightenment, Adorno writes, "cut the link between the aspect of truth in religion and the consciousness, and has retained only the objectified forms of religion."75 Faith becomes not a particular relation to nature or to one another but a commodity of mass culture to be exchanged as a private possession. In this Weberian kind of story, its structures are merely the heavy iron cage of fanatic belief without publicity. Adorno concludes bitterly that "antisemitism is all that the German Christians have retained of the religion of love."76 In this respect, religion is like culture itself that in modernity has "become wholly a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it."77

It was, therefore, an ideal content, not the historical reality, that might have attracted Adorno to various structures of traditional authority without wanting to restore them. The apparent warmth emanating from the respect for particularity residing at the heart of religion prompted him to seek redemption of its intersubjective, political potential. This traditional substratum might combat the isolation of individual-the paranoia and resentment externalized against the Jews-that radiates the feeling of "universal coldness."78 And the anti- dote for the chilling of public intercourse would be found, as noted, in the sensuousness of friendship, more abstractly in the recovery of a true mimetic comportment in relation to others, and in the comple- tion of the pedagogical project of the Enlightenment, cut short by the exigencies of historical development and the heteronomy of mass culture: "No one today, without exception, feels loved enough because no one is incapable of loving. The inability to identify was unquestion- ably the most important psychological condition for the event of Auschwitz among relatively ethical and harmless people."79

There is, however, hope to be glimpsed in this profound political and ethical alienation. Precisely because the drive for autonomy is the origin of subjectivity, however corrupted the process of its education along the way to maturity, autonomy remains, as we heard, "the only true force against the principle of Auschwitz." In light of the palpable "claustrophobia" of abject heteronomy-that is, the reality of Aus- chwitz-the principle of Auschwitz will finally be resisted. Nowhere does Adorno find this bleakly dialectical resistance manifested more forcefully than in the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka's work gives aesthetic

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expression to the complete reification of agency and object-relations. Indeed, his very writing-the graphic dissolution of words and things and the resulting hypertrophy of words over things-actualizes the historical reification in aesthetic form. But in the process of radical abjection, these texts also consummate emancipation by completing the dialectical process of diremption between subject and object: "By submersion into the internality of individuation Kafka finds the principle of individuation."80 Kafka's work represents the culmination of a historical process of subjective enslavement that can be overcome only by becoming conscious of it as a dialectical product of complete abjection.

By expressing the "principle" of individuation in its dangerous reas- sertion of magical unity with things, Adorno believes that the condition itself is thrust into a light of potential emancipation for the subject. In his posthumously published magnum opus, Adorno repeats this conviction about the redemptive potential of Kafka's writing:

Kafka's writings are no more artworks than they could ever have been religious documents. The material-according to Benjamin, the language in particular-becomes desolate, starkly conspicuous; spirit is imbued with the quality of a second-order abstractness. Kant's doctrine of the feeling of the sublime all the more describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content, though without, as art, divesting itself of its semblance character.81

In Kafka, the tragic politics of the artwork-as utopian model for politics that is simultaneously self-consciously only semblance-comes to an end with the promise of actual reconciliation. In this respect, Kafka's writing is the aesthetic homology to Auschwitz. In the genocide of European Jewry, the last remnants of political autonomy inherent in traditional authority and in religion are annihilated along with the victim of a truncated enlightenment. The total abjection of political autonomy results for Adorno in a collective "shudder," as the antisemite "catches a glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is."82

Through a speculative reconstellation of Adorno's writings on antisemitism, in particular, the dim outline of a bridge begins to emerge in the fog between historiographic and philosophical imperatives plagu- ing our understanding of the Holocaust and perhaps of modernity at large. The bridge is supported by a conjunction of Adorno's aesthetics with a latent philosophy of public life. Questions certainly remain, not least because Adorno's work struggles dialectically against operationalization. Yet the insights a reconstruction offers are manifold

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when sociology and psychologyjoin forces in dialectical speculation. In this parable of modern politics, it seems that at least the hope for emancipation is preserved. Moreover, in our ongoing obligation to comprehend the many facets of Auschwitz, the fox and the hedgehog, without losing responsibility for their respective tasks altogether, might have become closer collaborators.

Notes

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima

Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, 1974), 247.

2 See Jirgen Habermas, Struc- tural Transformation of the Public

Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). The extensive debate with

Habermas on the public sphere played itself out rather between the second generation Critical Theorists, beginning with Oskar Negt, an assistant to Habermas, and Alexander

Kluge, a student of Adorno's. For its complete history, see Arthur Strum, "A Bibliography of the Concept Offentlichkeit," New German Critique 61 (Winter 1994): 161-202.

3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor

W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten- ment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1998), 186.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search

of Wagner, trans. Rodney Living- stone (New York, 1981), 25.

5 Ibid., 24. 6 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialec-

tic, 186. 7 Ibid., 185. 8 See Anson Rabinbach, "The

Cunning of Reason: Mimesis

and the Construction of Anti-

Semitism in Horkheimer and

Adorno's Dialectic ofEnlighten- ment," in his In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlighten- ment (Berkeley, 1997), 166-98.

9 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dia- lectic, 198.

10 Ibid., 189. 11 Ibid., 187. 12 These are the words he used in

a lecture entitled "Zur

Bekampfung des Anti- semitismus heute" to the Erste

Europaische Padagogen- Konferenz des Deutschen

Koordinierungsrates der Gesell- schaft fur Christlich-Judische Zusammenarbeit in 1962. In

Adorno, Kritik. Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschafl (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 105-33, esp. 112.

13 On the ethical implications of mimesis in Adorno, see Martin

Jay, "Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe,"

in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuiderva-

art, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 29-53; Michael Cahn, "Subversive Mimesis: Theodor

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W. Adorno and the Modern

Impasse of Critique," in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Inter-

disciplinary Approach, Mihae Spariosu, ed. (Philadelphia, 1984); andJosef Frfchtl, Mime- sis: Konstellation eines

Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno

(Wiirzburg, 1986). 14 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic

Theory, trans. with intro. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), 5.

15 Max Weber, From Max Weber:

Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 342. With respect to issues of aesthetic autonomy, Weber's claim here is prescient of-and nearly as broad as-Adorno's, maintaining that, in the wake of secularization, "art becomes a cosmos of more and more

consciously grasped independent values which exist in their

own right" (ibid.). 16 Letter of Oct. 7, 1934, from

Adorno to Ernst Krenek, in Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst

Krenek, Briefwechsel, ed. Wolf-

gang Rogge (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 46.

17 Commentators have, however, eloquently raised this possibility. See especiallyJ. M. Bern- stein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic

Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pa., 1992), and Richard Wolin, "Mimesis, Utopia, and Reconcil- iation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory," in his The Terms of Cultural Criti- cism: The Frankfurt School, Existen-

tialism, Poststructuralism (New

York, 1992), 62-79. Wolin may go too far here with his claim that "one might go so far as to say that [Adorno's] entire philosophical program is motivated by a nostalgia for a lost pre- lapsarian unity of subject and object, concept and thing" (75). Adorno may have sought anticipatory redemption in the artwork, but he shared no nos-

talgia for a presubjective immediacy, which he viewed as regression to myth.

18 On the relation between so-

called functionalists and

intentionalists, see Timothy W. Mason, "Intention and Explana- tion: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in Der

Fiihrerstaat: Mythos und Realitdt, Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar

Kettenacker, eds. (Stuttgart, 1981), 21-40; Charles S. Maier, "A Holocaust Like the Others?

Problems of Comparative His- tory," in The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 66-99.

19 Adorno, "Zur Bekampfung des Antisemitismus," 113.

20 Reprinted in Eichmann inJerusa- lem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1964). See Arendt's critical exchanges with Gershom Scholem and Walter

Laqueur in TheJew as Pariah: Jewish Identity in the Modern Age, Ron H. Feldman, ed. (New York, 1978).

21 See Saul Friedlander's

exchange with Martin Broszat

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printed in Vierteljahrsheftefiir Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988) as "Uber die 'Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus,'" as well as the essays collected by Dan Diner in Ist der

Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?

Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).

22 Saul Friedlander, "Die

'Endl6sung.' Uber das Unbehagen in der Geschichtsdeutung," in Der historische Ort des

Nationalsozialismus.

Anndherungen, Walter H. Pehle, ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 81-93.

23 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View

of History (Chicago, 1993). 24 Friedlander, "Die 'Endl6sung,"'

91.

25 Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and theJews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York, 1997), 3.

26 Ibid., 1: 6. 27 I thank Marc Weiner for enunci-

ating this point in a response to an earlier version of this article.

28 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Dif- ferend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Min- neapolis, 1988), 89. This work is at the center of controversy regarding the structure of the sublime and the representability of the Holocaust. On this debate and its continuation, see

Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y, 1994).

29 Lyotard, Differend, 128.

30 Ibid., 50. 31 Ibid., 9.

32 See Rabinbach, "The Cunning of Reason," and Peter Uwe

Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, Neb., 1995).

33 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York, 1977), 100.


35 For a history of the Frankfurt School's research agenda, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Significance, trans. Michael Rob- erts (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), esp. 381-496, on the empirical studies guided by Adorno in both America and Germany. For a general history of the Institute of Social Research,

though more from Horkheimer's perspective, see the still indispensable work of Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagi- nation: A History of the Frankfurt

School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston, 1973). A complete bibliography can also be found in

Wiggershaus's book. 36 In addition to the extensive lit-

erature on Habermas's theory of communicative action, for

his critique of Hegel from this vantage point, seeJuirgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston, 1973). On the historical relation between politics and dialectical thinking, see Seyla

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Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York, 1986).

37 Within the vast literature on

modernity, for its philosophical enunciation, especially the Hegelian problem of diremption, see Robert B. Pippin, Mod- ernism as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). For a more programmatical expression of the intersubjective pre- suppositions of modernity and resolution of the diremption, see the celebrated work by Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosoph- ical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1987), esp. 23- 44. For an important extension of this reading of modernity to Adorno, see Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity:

Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Mid-

gley (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 38 Among the many works on the

concept of Bildung, the most invaluable remains Rudolf

Vierhaus, "Bildung," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zurpolitisch-

sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Otto Brunner et al., eds. (Stutt- gart, 1972-92), vol. 1, 508-51.

39 Theodor W. Adorno, "Theorie

der Halbbildung," in Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt am

Main, 1975), 66-94, esp. 77. 40 Theodor W. Adorno,

"Erziehung nach Auschwitz," in Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2

(Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 85- 101, esp. 87.

41 Ibid., 90.

42 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176. 43 Ibid., 193. On the redemptive

role of aesthetics in the recov-

ery of autonomous experience in Adorno, see J. M. Bernstein,

"Why Rescue Semblance? Meta- physical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics," in Huhn and Zuidevaard, eds., Semblance

of Subjectivity, 177-212. 44 Adorno, "Theorie der

Halbbildung," 70. 45 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and

Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1961), 64.

46 Adorno, "Theorie der

Halbbildung," 90. 47 Ibid., 86. 48 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 34. 49 Adorno, "Theorie der

Halbbildung," 87. 50 Ibid.

51 Adorno, "Erziehung nach Aus- chwitz," 95.

52 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, 1997), esp. 1-62.

53 Andrew Hewitt draws a com-

pelling connection between the heterosexuality of Adorno's model and its problematic affinity with the very bourgeois structures being critiqued, or what Hewitt identifies as

Adorno's archetype of the modern narcissist, the "homofasc- ist." See Hewitt, "The Frankfurt School and the Political Pathol-

ogy of Homosexuality," in his Political Inversions: Homosexual-

ity, Fascism, and the Modernist Imagination (Stanford, 1996), 38-78.

54 Theodor W. Adorno, "Freudian

Theory and the Pattern of Fas-

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cist Propaganda," in The Essen- tial Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Arato and Eike

Gebhardt, eds. (New York, 1992), 118-37, esp. 136.

55 See Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Politi- cal Ontology (Wo Es War) (Lon- don, 1999).

56 Adorno, "Freudian Theory," 127-28.

57 See Hewitt, "The Frankfurt School," esp. 52-55.

58 Adorno, "Freudian Theory," 126.

59 On the background to this exclusion, see Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 460-62.

60 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialec- tic, 207.

61 See Georg Simmel, "The Con- flict in Modern Culture," in On

Individuality and Social Forms, ed. with intro. Donald N. Lev-

ine (Chicago, 1971), 375-93. 62 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialec-

tic, 202.

63 Here I agree with Peter Hohendahl's inference (in Pris-

matic Thought, 115) from Adorno's Heine essay: "The psychological model of racism as a mechanism in which the victim

is replaceable presupposes that there can be no essentiallyJew- ish character, that the 'Jewish' character-its otherness-is the

invention of the racist."

64 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialec- tic, 175.

65 On the issue ofJews and assimi-

lation, see George Mosse, Con- fronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Hanover, N.H., 1993); Fritz Stern, "The Burden of Success: Reflections

on GermanJewry," in his Dreams and Delusions: The Drama

of German History (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 97-114; Viktor Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie:Juden in der europdischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Anson Rabinbach, "Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern German- Jewish Messianism," in In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 27-65. On the aftermath of this his-

tory in the early twentieth century, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance ofJewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996), and Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-

Jewish Modernism (Lincoln, Neb., 1999).

66 Adorno, "Erziehung nach Aus- chwitz," 88-89.


68 Theodor W. Adorno, "Heine the Wound," in Notes to Litera- ture, vol. 1, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1991), 80-85.

69 Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 114.


71 Ibid., 196. 72 Peter Fritzsche recently pro-

posed a similar, if not so deter- minedly somber thesis on the changing structures of Wilhelm- ine society. He claims that the decline of traditional authority in the final years of the Second Empire both opened the door

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and was prompted by an increasingly sovereign and self- assertive will of the people that, in Fritzsche's version, has an almost Rousseau-like flair of the

general will. See Fritzsche, Ger- mans into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

73 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 196-97. Adorno ech- oes this sentiment two decades

later in his speech on antisemitism, conceding with a critical glance that he was "aware that actually the active and most reliable forces that

can be found in Germany today at all fighting against antisemitism, are often reli-

gious groups" (Zur Bekampfung des Anti- semitismus," 111).

74 Adorno, "Freudian Theory," 129.


76 Ibid.

77 Ibid., 197. 78 Adorno, "Erziehung nach Aus-

chwitz," 100. 79 Ibid., 98. 80 Theodor W. Adorno,

"Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka," in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesell-

schaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 250-83, esp. 281.

81 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 196. 82 Ibid., 245.

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antisemitism as distorted politics: adorno on the public sphere

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