602021, issue 2
The Fragile Strength of a Dissolving Subjectivity
José A. Zamora
As a man who, by rights, should have been put to death, and according to whom it
was only by chance that he escaped the extermination perpetrated by the National
Socialists, he felt “the drastic guilt of him who was spared.” This feeling was born of the
inevitable complicity of the survivor and the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity
that made such extermination possible in the rst place: coldness. In this respect, Adorno
had no doubts: one cannot continue to live if the enormous suering brought about by
catastrophe is constantly borne in mind. To continue reproducing one’s own existence
under the conditions established by capitalist socialization demands coldness in the face
of the suering of those who were annihilated. Such coldness is not simply an attribute
of certain individuals, but rather, it is an objective principle of social relations under
which all the members of capitalist society reproduce their existence.
Therefore, when rethinking the linkage between subjectivation and suering,
we must not overlook the fact that Adorno writes not about the damaged life but, rather,
from it. In Minima Moralia it is not the sovereign subject, master both of his own will and
ability to know, who ponticates on the just life. Rather, it is a subject who is doubly
wounded by the violence of the barbarity that blighted Europe and by the keen aware-
ness of the dehumanizing cost of continuing to live during and after the catastrophe. In
other words, it is a subject that acknowledges the impossibility of leading a just life in
the wrong and who therefore recognizes that it is no longer possible to experience the
truth about life other than by confronting its alienated form; that is, confronting “the
objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses”
(“Dedication”).
Indeed, thought becomes paralyzed when faced with such an unfolding of eec-
tive destruction, one that even assumes the irrational price of ultimate self-destruction.
Furthermore, many of the great ideas of enlightenment modernity pale in the face
of such destruction: reason, the subject, autonomy, emancipation, and progress. The
reversal of means and ends that undermines the enlightened imperative of treating indi-
viduals as ends themselves, which, within this tradition, could nevertheless be criticized
and countered, reveals the absurdity of the process of capitalist modernization which
consummates this reversal by transforming life into an ephemeral apparition. Before
such a process, naivety is no longer possible. Barbarity is not the other in relation to this
process. Rather, barbarity’s roots are buried in that process and its contradictions. This
fact requires a radical self-critique of enlightened modernity and its fundamental gures
of self-understanding. First, the idea of the subject, which in itself is an exemplary
compendium of the signal ideas of said modernity; all of Adorno’s eorts to radically
critique modern subjectivation and subjectivity are motivated by the experiences of
barbarity that blight the twentieth century. Such experiences drive him to attempt to
unravel not only the processes that constitute this specic subjectivity, but also the ties
that bind the crushing objectivity of the historical dynamic and the dissolution of the
subject, ties that became absolute in the extermination camps but was never limited to
the camps.
612021, issue 2
Throughout Minima Moralia, Adorno repeatedly reects on the conditions of
possibility of an inquiry into the subject’s experience of dissolution, which itself is
necessarily aporetic. This moment of reection is aporetic because even if one lacks
any intention of doing so, in its unfolding one reproduces the illusion of the same
subject that questions its own existence in light of its experience of self-annihilation.
For this reason, such reection cannot simply surrender itself to the immediacy of an
apparently authentic subjective experience, disregarding the objective mediation that
constitutes and transcends it. However, neither is there some theoretical understanding
of objectivity that dissolves the “subject” form without the painful experience of the
individual who has been emptied of this substance, one which can only come from
non-antagonistic objectivity, from a place free of coercion. Following Hegel’s inten-
tion and not his bias in favour of a false totality over and against the singular, Adorno
considers precisely that which disappears as essential in perceiving the true character of
the false totality. Recognition of the primacy of an antagonistic totality, of the objective
tendency that manifests itself in the annihilation of the individual, its eective ally, pro-
hibits its reication and, all the more, the glorication of a universality whose negativity
is accessible only through the individual experience of the coercion and domination
that ruin his life.
The point of intersection between antagonistic objectivity and individual
experience is suering, the “objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective
experience, its expression, is objectively mediated” (Adorno 1973, 17-18). Hence, for
Adorno, the two poles—individual experience and a critical theory of society—claim
each other, without the tension between them disappearing and without either one
being able to do without the other at any time. Theory that intends to articulate a crit-
ical self-awareness of reied social relations, which are objectied and almost closed o
to theoretical and practical questioning, must feed on subjective experience. However,
this experience needs this very same theory if it is to become an undiminished, unad-
ministered experience. This collaboration is possible because it involves an experience
that develops from its object as a contradictory and dynamic object and which, precisely
for this reason, is not purely subjective and insubstantial: the experience gathers in itself
all the burden of objectivity that courses through it, and as soon as it is mediated by the
rationality that informs this objectivity it makes possible its theoretical approach, namely
the work of the concept. Regardless of how weakened it became, for Adorno, the
possibility of experiencing in itself the coercive force that individuals suer in a society
marked by the tendency to total socialization had never been suppressed. Furthermore,
he never lost trust in the possibility that the content of that experience could emerge in
the interpretation of social and cultural phenomena. It is precisely upon such content
that the theory of social objectivity should draw.
622021, issue 2
José A. Zamora is a Senior Researcher at the
Institute of Philosophy (Spanish Higher Council
for Scientific Research - CSIC), Madrid-Spain.
PhD (Münster/Germany). His research lines are
Critical Theory (Th.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin),
Social Suffering, Authoritarianism, Philosophy
after Auschwitz, Political Theologies of Modernity.
Main publications:Krise -Kritik -Erinnerung.
Ein politisch-theologischer Versuch über das Denken
Adornos im Horizont der Krise der Moderne[Crisis –
Critique - Memory. A political-theological attempt
about Adorno›s thinking in the horizon of the
crisis of modernity] (1995),Th. W. Adorno: Pensar
contra la barbarie[Th. W. Adorno: Thinking against
Barbarism] (2004; port. 2008) andLa crisis y sus
víctimas[The crisis and its victims] (2014). He chairs
the «Sociedad de Estudios de Teoría Crítica» and is
editor ofConstelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica.
Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics.
London and New York: Routledge.
References Biography
