892021, issue 2
This Side of the Pleasure Principle
Peter E. Gordon
“He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure [...] has a stable and valid
idea of truth.” This surely ranks among the more memorable and provocative statements
in Adorno’s Minima Moralia; it appears in the reection (§ 37) in which the author
oers critical remarks on the more repressive or anti-utopian themes in psychoanalysis.
The title itself is intended as a sly riposte to Freud, whose Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) introduced the controversial idea of a destructive instinct (Todestrieb) alongside
the instinct for pleasure (Lustprinzip) or libido. Written in the immediate aftermath of
the First World War, Freud’s revisionist argument for a second and competing instinct
of aggression arguably marked a conservative turn in psychoanalytic theory, insofar as
it prepared the theoretical terrain for the idea that civilization can only survive if it
represses the instinct for aggression that is a piece of the human being’s own psychic
constitution. Adorno rejects this conservative theme as a sign of Freud’s “unenlight-
ened Enlightenment.” On the one hand, Freud was the great opponent of bourgeois
moralism; he endorsed the maligned ideal of human happiness as a “critical standard”
for his work. On the other hand, Freud reconrmed the that very same moralism as a
social necessity. In modern culture, Adorno writes, psychoanalysis is poised in ambiva-
lence—between a “desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for
open oppression.” In my own ongoing encounter with Minima Moralia, these critical
reections on psychoanalysis remain of greatest importance, not least because they oer
a corrective to the dominant interpretation of Adorno as an embittered negativist who
looks upon modern society as a place of unremitting darkness in which true happiness
is impossible and “life is not lived.” In his rejoinder to Freud, Adorno appears in a dier-
ent and unfamiliar light: he aligns himself with “blind somatic pleasure” as if it furnished
the key to unrealized utopia. Perhaps nowhere else in the book does its author provide
such a forthright conrmation of what he has announced in the opening dedication to
his friend Max Horkheimer, namely, that his “melancholy science” remains faithful to
philosophy’s ancient task: “the teaching of the right life.”
As someone who feels an ongoing connection to the tradition of critical theory,
I nd this particular reection from Minima Moralia especially instructive. It reminds us
that social criticism remains committed to a standard of human happiness even if the
surrounding world has miserably failed that standard. Few aphorisms in the book so
vividly express this commitment and thereby underscore the normative ideal of a life
worth living that still animates critical theory. Most striking of all is Adorno’s conclud-
ing suggestion that in modern culture, the imperative of repression imposes itself on
us from two directions: the moralist’s hostility to pleasure and the unbeliever’s hostility
to paradise. Although he lies at the furthest remove from any religious faith, Adorno
resists the crude dualism between materialism and metaphysics. He recognizes that the
religious longing for ultimate fulllment is not merely annulled in the simplest demand
for material pleasure but nds its dialectical realization. Metaphysics is honoured at the
moment of its fall.
902021, issue 2
Biography
Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of
History and Faculty Affiliate in Germanic Languages
and Literatures and in the Department of Philosophy
at Harvard University. A frequent contributor of
reviews and criticism to periodicals such asThe
Nation, The New Republic, The Boston Review, andThe
New York Review of Books, he is the author of several
books on critical theory and the history of modern
European philosophy, includingRosenzweig and
Heidegger: between Judaism and German Philosophy
(2003);Continental Divide:Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
(2010);Adorno and Existence(2016); andMigrants
in the Profane:Critical Theory and the Question of
Secularization(2020).He has also co-edited several
volumes, includingThe Routledge Companion to
the Frankfurt School,with Espen Hammer and Axel
Honneth (2018).
