572021, issue 2
The Possibility of a “Felt Contact with Objects”
Sudeep Dasgupta
In the “Dedication” to Max Horkheimer which opens Minima Moralia, Adorno reects
on the personal aphorisms which follow thus: “Subjective reection, even if critically
alerted to itself, has something sentimental and anachronistic about it” . Sentimentality,
because the reections of the subject seem irrelevant or deluded in the face of the
objective conditions which have precipitated “the dissolution of the subject” (ibid).
Reections from a damaged life, the subtitle of the collection, will have something
anachronistic about them, because the life out of which the subject reects has been
thoroughly debased by the social relations of production: “Our perspective of life has
passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer”. However,
in typical Adornian fashion, the dim and depressing picture being drawn will be given
a negative dialectical turn of the screw. Adorno continues: “But the relation between
life and production, which in reality debases the former to an ephemeral appearance of the
latter, is totally absurd … Reduced and degraded essence [life] tenaciously resists the
magic [produced by production] that transforms it [life] into a façade” (ibid., emphasis
added). In what follows, I will glean those moments in Minima Moralia where Adorno’s
reections from this debased and degraded life oer ways of thinking resistance.
In his defense of the particular Adorno assigns “individuation” not “the inferior
status” in relation to the whole Hegel constructs, but “a driving moment in the process”
of a social and historical totality marked by contradiction. Precisely because “the social-
ization of society has enfeebled and undermined him”, Adorno argues “the individual
has gained […] in richness, dierentiation and vigour” (17). A politics of the possible
emerges from the very rifts and contradictions engendered by objective conditions and
registered at the level of subjective experience. That is why the violent conditions of
socialization are both the context and the very conditions of possibility for resisting it.
Minima Moralia closes in the “Finale” with the suggestion “Perspectives must be fash-
ioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices” as
both “indigent and distorted”. Yet these perspectives can only emerge from perspectives
“marked […] by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape” (§ 153).
How can estranging perspectives on the world emerge from “felt contact with objects”
(§ 153)1 in an estranged world, and what help could Adorno’s reections in Minima
Moralia oer?
The resistance of the object to conceptual capture, and the ways in which this
resistance is felt at the level of subjective experience, is precisely what the subject feels
in its contact with, rather than violent appropriation of, the object. The use of style
defamiliarizes the subject’s exposition of its relation to the object and registers, through
writing, the immorality of the demand to be clear and communicate. In “Morality and
style”, Adorno avers “Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect
in any expression” (§ 64). The demand for “certain understanding”, that is the certainty
produced by perfect comprehension, negates what emerges when style registers “the
regard for the object” rather than its subsumption to concepts. Subjective experience
which registers “felt contact with objects” will sabotage the demand that the exposition
582021, issue 2
of thought must be made familiar to the reader through showing “explicitly all the
steps that have led him to his conclusion” (§ 50) to enable duplication.2 Estranging
perspectives on reality are expressed and registered through the form given to thought’s
relation to the object: “For the value of thought is measured by its distance from the
continuity of the familiar” (§ 50), its distance from “the instantaneous sizing-up of
the situation” in order “to see what is ‘going on’ more quickly than the moments of
signicance in the situation can unfold” (§ 92).3
The non-transparency of the objective world, sought to be made clear by
communicative reason and lucid language, requires a reformulation of the knowledge
produced by the subject. Reections that emerge from the damaged life of a subject
produce knowledge that registers precisely the contradictions, rifts and ssures which
accompany the subject’s experience of what Shierry Weber Nicholson (2019) calls
“malignant normality”. That is why in “Gaps”, Adorno asserts “knowledge comes to
us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppo-
sitions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, rmly-founded but by no means
uniformly transparent medium of experience” (§ 50 emphasis added). Estranging perspectives
emerge then precisely from the felt experience with objects of the partly opaque and
contingent process by which thought reects on life as “a wavering, deviating line” (§
50). Experience registers the contingency of the normalcy of domination, of life being
otherwise, of another “possible” life, and that is why Adorno casts life as “an ephemeral
appearance” rather than the permanent and achieved eect of reication. Miriam Bratu
Hansen (2011) has explored precisely the importance of bodily experience in Adorno’s
aesthetic theory where the contradictions, rifts, and violence of damaged life are reg-
istered. The concept of “dissonance” also describes precisely an aspect of subjective
experience from which Adorno begins to glimpse the possibility of a critical reection
on damaged life4.
Estranging perspectives on the given to think the possible, the deployment of
style to register the felt contact with the object, the potential of subjective experience
to register an indigent and distorted reality, the centrality of rifts, dissonance, and con-
tradiction in thinking the relation of the particular to the general – through the form
of the aphorism –, Minima Moralia congures modalities of resistance for a possible
other life as it itself, and as a collection/constellation the book exemplies the process
of “thought thinking itself ”5 through a felt contact with objects.
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1
2
3
4
5
Elsewhere Adorno begins to expand on this
aphoristic phrase: “in philosophy, we literally seek to
immerse ourselves in things that are heterogenous
to it, without placing those things in prefabricated
categories […] to adhere as closely to the hetero-
genous” (Adorno 2000, 13, emphasis added).
In “genuine style”, Adorno offers a counter-
formulation to systemic thinking. Here, he argues
that “style is a promise” to the extent that it refuses
“achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of
form and content, inner and outer, individual and
society” and registers the tension between the
poles of the general and the particular (Adorno
and Horkheimer 2002, 103; see also Edward W. Said
2007).
Critiquing the static character of systems in
which thought places objects and thus subsumes
them to concepts, elsewhere (2000, 25) Adorno
states: “To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit
and register it in its system of reference, is nothing
but to perceive the individual moment in its
immanent connection with others”. An estranging
perspective refuses precisely the temporality of a
system, of thought as “instantaneous sizing-up”, and
notes the unfolding moments of the object in its
relation to others.
“What we differentiate will appear divergent,
dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure
of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity”
(Adorno 2000, 5; See also Dasgupta 2019).
Cook analyzes Adorno’s call that “metaphysics
today should question whether, and to what extent,
thought can transcend the sphere of concepts, or
of thought objects, to think material things” (2007,
229). The essay is one place which fleshes out what
“the felt contact with things” for Adorno might
mean for philosophy. The subject’s feeling through
contact with things, as Adorno argues and Cook
explains, is quite different from the recent focus on
objects in Object-Oriented Ontology.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2000. Negative Dialectics. New
York: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bratu Hansen, Miriam. 2011. Cinema and Experience:
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W.
Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cook, Deborah. 2007. “Thought Thinking itself.”
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38
(3): 229-247.
Dasgupta, Sudeep. 2019. “The Aesthetics of
Displacement: Dissonance and Dissensus in
Adorno and Rancière.” In S. Durham, &
D. Gaonkar (Eds.),Distributions of the Sensible:
Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Said, Edward W. 2007. On Late Style: Music and
Literature against the Grain. London: Vintage.
Weber Nicholson, Shierry. 2019. “Adorno’s
Minima Moralia: Malignant Normality and
the Dilemmas of Resistance.” Lecture at
Symposium “Theodor W. Adorno: Fifty Years
after his Death”, Institute of the Humanities,
San Francisco University, November 29, 2019.
References
Biography
Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the
Department of Media Studies, the Amsterdam
School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the
Amsterdam Centre for Globalization Studies (ACGS)
at the University of Amsterdam. His publications
focus on the aesthetics and politics of displacement
in visual culture, from the disciplinary perspectives
of aesthetics, postcolonial and globalization studies,
political philosophy, and feminist and queer theory.
Publications include “The Aesthetics of Indirection:
Intermittent Adjacencies and Subaltern Presences
at the Borders of Europe”, Cinéma et Cie 17:28
(2017), the co-edited volume (with Mireille Rosello)
What’s Queer about Europe ? (Fordham University
Press, 2014), and Constellations of the Transnational:
Modernity, Culture, Critique (Rodopi, 2007).
Notes
