632021, issue 2
Unity in Suffering
Nicholas Baer
“One should be united with the suering of people: the smallest step toward their plea-
sures is one toward the hardening of suering” (§ 5). Thus concludes the fth aphorism
of Minima Moralia, Part One (1944), where Theodor W. Adorno reects on the role of
the intellectual in a world of ongoing horror. Preguring Leo Löwenthal’s identication
of Nichtmitmachen (nonparticipation) as an essential feature of critical theory, Adorno
characterizes Mitmachen (participation) as a screen for the tacit acceptance of inhuman-
ity: the pleasantries of everyday sociability perpetuate silence on injustice, and aability
masks brute domination under the guise of egalitarianism. In place of a disingenuous
self-alignment with the oppressed and their sources of pleasure, steadfast isolation serves
as the intellectual’s sole form of solidarity, with suering as the true basis of unity.
Adorno’s statement marks a rebuke to Hegelian philosophy, which had rational-
ized individual suering as part of a grand metaphysical plan of history. This theodicean,
idealist philosophy had ascribed a higher truth or meaning to material suering, thereby
arming the existing social order and justifying abuses of power in the name of divine
right or progress. Joining a lineage of Hegel’s critics (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche), Adorno
and other members of the Frankfurt School sought to lend voice to the senseless,
irreparable suering of history. In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno wrote that if Hegel
“transgured the totality of historic suering into the positivity of the self-realizing
absolute,” the world spirit that moves forth—like the ruinous storm that drives Walter
Benjamin’s angel of history into the future—“would teleologically be the absolute of
suering” (2004, 320; see also Noble-Olson 2020).
Yet suering was not only a historical-philosophical issue for Adorno, but also
an aesthetic one. While Adorno was critical of a culture industry that oered a sinister
palliative for mass suering, re-consigning consumers to misery through false promises
of pleasure and escape, he also maintained that art was unique in its ability to give
expression to suering without betrayal. Famously asserting and later nuancing the
claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1983, 34; see also 2004, 362),
Adorno postulated that the abundance of suering paradoxically both prohibits and
demands the existence of art, which necessitates an aesthetic autonomy from the real
suering that it nonetheless serves to remember. At the close of his posthumously
published Aesthetic Theory (1970), he asked “what would art be, as the writing of history,
if it shook o the memory of accumulated suering” (2002, 261).
When revisiting Minima Moralia today, Adorno’s resolute isolation from the
pleasures of the oppressed may sound ascetic and elitist, and his call for suering as a
point of unity rings hollow in a geopolitical landscape where even the most coercive
entities mobilize the rhetoric of victimhood (see Geuss 2005, 17-18). Yet, however
undierentiated and undialectical Adorno’s account of suering, it remains a vital anti-
dote to the often-cynical, reied politics of Leiden (suering, pain) and Mitleid (com-
passion, sympathy) in our own time. Adorno’s work helps to establish suering as a
key concern of philosophy, opening a series of questions that have lost none of their
actuality: Which art gives unbetrayed expression to suering? How can we avoid forms
642021, issue 2
of complicity, desensitization, and false comfort? And what is the role of the intellectual
in a world of violent domination and unremitting horror?
Adorno,Theodor W. 1983. “Cultural Criticism and
Society.” In Prisms, translated by Samuel and
Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, translated
by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum.
Adorno,Theodor W. 2004. Negative Dialectics.
Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge.
Geuss, Raymond. 2005. “Suffering and Knowledge
in Adorno.” Constellations 12 (1): 3–20.
Noble-Olson, Matthew. 2020. “The Angels of
Accumulated Suffering.” New German Critique
47 (2): 217–246.
Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of Film Studies
in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at
the University of Groningen and Junior Fellow at
the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study in
Greifswald. He has co-edited two volumes of film
and media theory: the award-winning The Promise of
Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University
of California Press, 2016) and Unwatchable (Rutgers
University Press, 2019). Baer has published on film
and media, critical theory, and intellectual history
in journals such as Film Quarterly, Leo Baeck Institute
Year Book, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar,
and October, and his writings have been translated
into six languages. At present, he is completing a
monograph, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and
the Crisis of Historicism, which examines films of
the Weimar Republic in relation to the “crisis of
historicism” that was widely diagnosed by German
intellectuals in the interwar period.
References Biography
