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.